


Side B

by chiiyo86



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Case Fic, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Mary Lives, Mind Control, Mother-Son Relationship, Psychic kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-12
Updated: 2014-11-12
Packaged: 2018-02-25 00:01:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2601209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiiyo86/pseuds/chiiyo86
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. After her husband's death, Mary Winchester tried to do her best for her sons: she taught them how to defend themselves against the monsters that go bump in the night, but tried to keep them out of hunting and give them as normal a life as possible. But while Sam has followed his mother’s wishes and gone to college, Dean has become a hunter and he and Mary haven’t talked in years. A hunt brings the family together and forces them to confront the past.</p><p>AKA, the AU where some people who are dead aren’t, and some people who aren’t dead are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Side B

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [spn_gen_bigbang](http://spn-gen-bigbang.livejournal.com/). I thought I would never be able to finish this fic! I'm glad I managed to do it, although I will let you be the judges of whether the result was worth the struggle. I'm very grateful to my artist, [wataru-kisugi](wataru-kisugi.livejournal.com%20) for her enthusiasm for the fic and her hard work on the art - please don't forget to check her post [here](http://wataru-kisugi.livejournal.com/7885.html) and leave her comments! Thank you also to [bellatemple](bellatemple.livejournal.com) for her thorough beta work. This fic owes a lot to those two people.

The sound of something breaking woke Mary up. She was instantly awake and lucid, no in-between fuzziness, her hand sliding across her bed and meeting the solid wood of her nightstand. She opened the drawer almost soundlessly to grab her gun.

When she was a child, Mary had been afraid of the dark. She remembered being little and watching the shadows in her room with the brutal, intimate conviction that the dark was actively malevolent, waiting for her to fall asleep before it pounced on her. She wasn’t afraid of the monsters she knew went bump in the night, though; hunting tales were her bedtime stories, and she trusted, with a small child’s confidence, that her daddy would fend them all off.

She didn’t know why it was coming back to her as she made her way downstairs, navigating the shadowed hallway with ease and finding the steps from the staircase with the tips of her toes. Now, of course, everything was different. Mary was still afraid, but not of the same things. 

There was a series of other noises—the muffled click of the fridge’s door closing down, the squeaking sound of a chair scraping on the kitchen tiles, then a soft, breathed-out curse—and Mary relaxed. There was so real stealth here, which meant no one—or nothing—was trying to creep into her house. She entered the kitchen and switched on the overhead light. The tall figure standing by the table jerked around and swore.

“Mom!” Sam whined and covered his eyes with a hand, protecting them from the light washing over him. “You scared me. What’re you doing up?”

“Heard a noise.” She leaned against the doorframe, her gun hand falling against her side and between the folds of her nightgown. “Did you break something?”

Sam made a guilty face and crouched to the floor to pick up the shards of a broken glass. Mary let him do it, didn’t move from her position at the door instead of rushing to his help like she usually would. It was high time she stopped coddling him, she told herself—but, she also didn’t want him to see that she’d brought her gun down with her. It wasn’t that the sight of it would scare him: he was a practiced marksman, she’d seen to that, and was used to all kinds of weapons. She just didn’t want to worry him. Didn’t want to have him tiptoe around his old paranoid hunter mom.

“Sorry I woke you up, Mom,” Sam said, unfolding his long body as he stood up. “I was thirsty.”

“Partied too hard?” She smiled to show him that she was joking and not mom-nagging, but he looked flustered anyway.

“You know I wouldn’t—”

“I know, sweetie.” Her hand hidden behind her back, she padded barefoot up to him, and had to rise on her tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. He was so much taller than her now, taller even than his father had been. A man, not a little kid anymore, but she couldn’t help thinking about him as her baby. Her youngest. “Happy birthday, love.”

His smile dimpled. “It’s half-an-hour past my birthday.”

“I get to decide when your birthday ends. I was the one who suffered all day long for it.”

“Ugh, Mom.”

“Did your brother wish you a happy birthday?”

These were not the words she had planned to say. She heard them come out of her mouth and felt like someone had used her body to do it without her consent.

Sam’s smile and dimples smoothed over. “Mom, don’t.”

“What?” She let out a ripple of completely unnatural laugh. “What did I say? I know you’re in touch with your brother. It’s fine, I’m not mad.”

“Come on, don’t do that. I told you before: I’m not acting as a go-between you and Dean. You want to know how he’s doing—”

“It was just a simple question—”

“—then you only have to pick up the phone. Same as I do.” He was looking at her with his face set hard in annoyance, but it lasted all of thirty seconds before his hard expression crumpled and he sighed. “He’s fine. In fact he just called, that’s why I was awake. He was coming back from a hunt and—”

She lifted a hand and he stopped talking. So Dean was still hunting—what was she saying, of course he was still hunting, otherwise he would’ve come back home. Or maybe not, after all. He had turned twenty-six; he was no more a kid than Sam was.

“I’m going back to bed,” she said stiffly.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her back.

She heaved a sigh, shoulders jumping up and down with it. It was unfair of her to make Sam feel bad over her own slip of the tongue. He was in an uncomfortable position, torn between his brother and his mother, and she knew that she should try as much as she could to leave him out of this. She never had one serious fight with Sam. She didn’t want to lose him too.

“I’m just tired,” she said with a smile, turning around to give his cheek a pat. “That’s all. You should go back to bed, too. You have an early start tomorrow.”

“Yes, I know,” he said, dragging the last syllable with twelve-year-old annoyance, but his eyes searched her face, his brow furrowed with concern. “Mom—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She said it gently, so he knew she wasn’t upset with him. “Goodnight, baby.”

She went back to her room upstairs, feeling like her heart had turned into a block of stone. She went to bed with her fingers curled around the grip of her gun, just like when she was ten and her father had given her her first one. She watched the branches from the tree in front of her window painting fantastic shadows over the wall. She tried to keep her mind blank, but her last conscious thought, right when her defenses were muddled with sleep, was for Dean.

\---

The crude light coming from above the bathroom mirror wasn’t doing him any favors. His face was sallow and the shadows below his eyes made them look like hollow sockets. Uncanny. Dean leaned forward until his nose came close to the mirror, poking at the red mark swelling on his cheekbone. It wasn’t even a wound he’d received heroically wrestling a werewolf or something; no, he’d gotten this one from a little lady’s backhand slap, when she’d confused his pushing her out of a murderous’ ghost way with an attempt at purse-snatching.

There was no way it wasn’t going to bruise, he thought mournfully. And for his next hunts he’d look to all like he’d gotten into a bar fight, which wouldn’t help him gain trust points from people. He sighed and tugged at his t-shirt collar, proceeding to peel off his clothes for a shower. Once naked he stepped into the bathtub; now was the time to figure how the shower worked here. That was one of the banes of his life on the road: who wants to get home tired from work—and in his case, often beaten up and filthy—and have to fight with the shower?

There was a vaguely spade-shaped handle that he tried to pull, then to push, and he wasn’t sure which action had worked when a trickle of water started to drip down from the faucet. He spent a few more minutes struggling to pull the thingy fixed over the faucet so that the running water shifted to the showerhead. He knew it’d worked when he was suddenly drenched by an overhead downpour. He tipped his head back and offered his face to the hot water, then leaned forward, hands against the shower tiles, letting the water beat over his bent back.

He let out a moan. “Oh, god, feels so good.” Better than sex, it felt. Or, okay, maybe not, but certainly better than jerking off. He pressed his forehead against the wall and closed his eyes. He could admit it to himself: he was feeling a little blue tonight. Sometimes hunting on the road was lonely, and calling Sammy yesterday for his birthday, while his brother was at home—no, at their mother’s house, where he wasn’t welcome anymore—had brought it all out.

He gave himself one more minute, then straightened up and started vigorously shampooing his hair, rubbing his scalp until it stung to get rid of the dirt from all the grave digging he’d done tonight. The rushing sound of water almost covered the noise of someone knocking on the door. He shut the water to make sure, and there it was again, louder and tinged with impatience.

“Goddamn it,” he mumbled. “Who the goddamn hell is—Alright, I’m coming!” he shouted after another resounding thud, like the person knocking had closed their fist to pound on the door.

He almost slipped hurrying out of the bathtub, catching himself on the edge of the sink before he fell and hit his head. He decided against the hassle of putting on some clothes and merely wrapped a towel around his hips; whoever it was could deal with his half-naked body.

“Coming,” he repeated in case his visitor hadn’t heard him from the bathroom. He could feel a headache blooming between his eyes and wasn’t in the mood for another round of knocking. “Don’t get your—” 

He lost what he was going to say when he opened the door and discovered the person behind it. She was hot, was his first thought. Tall and curvy, smooth dark skin, curly hair cropped short. He didn’t mind if _she_ saw him half-naked. His second thought was that he knew her from somewhere. Her severe gaze, her high cheekbones rang a bell. 

“Hey… Vivian!” He pointed a triumphant finger at her. “Vivian Walker! Right.” He rested nonchalantly against the doorframe, one arm up above his head. “How’s it going?”

She gave him a cold once over, starting from his bare feet, then raking the whole length of his body to finally pin him with a death glare. “Hi, Dean. Do you have a minute?”

“Sure!” He waited for more; she pinched her lips and pointedly looked over his shoulder. “Oh, er, do come in.”

He hadn’t done more to the motel room than throw his duffle bag on the bed, but she managed to look around the room, find it lacking, and disapprove him for it. She drew out one of the two chairs placed at the little round table by the window and sat down. It was only when she put a yellow folder down on the table that Dean noticed she’d been holding it against her chest.

“Please have a seat,” Dean said with a touch of sarcasm and a little flourish of the hand. For all that he was in favor of receiving pretty women to his room at night, he was tired, sore, dripping from his interrupted shower, and it didn’t look like this conversation was going to turn into more pleasant activities anytime soon. “I’ll put some pants on.”

“You do that.”

The jeans that were crumpled in a heap inside the bathroom were stained with dirt and fresh grass, so he turned to his bag and fumbled through it for a clean pair. He didn’t go to the bathroom to get dressed, but dropped his towel to the floor and slipped into his jeans commando, his backside to Vivian. He wasn’t shy about his body, and if it bothered her, well, tough shit; she should’ve chosen a decent hour to come find him.

“Alright.” He dropped into the other chair. His t-shirt clung to his wet skin, darker patches starting to form, and the wet denim of his jeans chafed uncomfortably against his sensitive bits, but he leaned back into his chair, watching her with a smile. She looked so serious, it made him want to find a way to wrinkle that smooth surface. Had they slept together? He remembered clearly meeting her at Bill Harvelle’s Roadhouse, one night after a tough hunt. They’d talked, they’d drunk, and he couldn’t remembered how that night had ended.

“What did you want to talk to me about?”

“The yellow-eyed man,” she said, and he felt his smile drop.

“What did you just say?”

“You heard me. And you’re the one who told me about him, so don’t play dumb.”

He definitely didn’t remember _that_ , so he must have been even more shitfaced that night than he’d thought. His heartbeat picked up and all tiredness and aches were forgotten, adrenaline giving him a second wind. He gripped the edges of his chair to anchor himself, feeling his fingers get slick with sweat.

“What do you have to say about the yellow-eyed man?”

“I may have a lead. Are you interested or what?”

He was not feeling amused, flirty, or even tired anymore. “Okay, start talking.”

\---

Half-awake, moving on autopilot, Sam shut off the water and dried his hands on the bunched up hand towel one of his roommates had abandoned on the side of the sink. It was a contrast with the bathroom at home, even if his mom wasn’t by any means a clean freak: the shaving kits crowded the space around the sink, smelly wet towels had been left on the floor, and Sam had had to clean the sink from leftover hairs. 

And yet, as much as he loved his mother, he enjoyed living on campus even if home was only half-an-hour away. Whenever he was home he felt like his brother’s ghost was lingering around the house, even if it had been over six years since he’d left. It didn’t help that his mother went out of her way to avoid saying Dean’s name. 

Sam stifled a yawn. It was time to get back to bed; his first class was early in the morning and he’d stayed up late finishing an essay for his International Journalism class. He switched off the light in the bathroom and crossed the living area between the two rooms of their four-person suite in the dark. He knew where all the furniture was, but it was still a bit of a hazardous journey. He was concentrating on his feet, trying not to stumble on any shoe, book, or controller, when something touched his arm. A voice whispered to his ear, “Hey, careful there.”

His reflexes kicked in and he twisted his arm to escape the intruder’s grip, while his other hand formed a fist, ready to throw a punch. A strong hand caught his wrist and the voice said, “Jesus, Sammy!”

“Dean?” Sam shook his hand free and let it drop against his side; it was trembling a little as the adrenaline rush ebbed and left him tingling. “Dude, what the fuck?”

“Is that a way to welcome your brother?”

“What are you—Damn it.” Sam went to switch on the light, cursing some more on the way when he knocked his hip against the couch. “Okay,” he said, turning to his brother and crossing his arms over his chest. “What the hell, Dean?”

Dean was standing in the middle of the room, blinking owlishly against the sudden light. Sam hadn’t seen him in months but he looked the same as ever, from the leather jacket he wore—a memorabilia of their father—to the spiky hair and the steel-toe boots. He even still had the friendship bracelet Sam had made him years ago around his wrist; it was hot pink and purple, because Sam had had the nebulous notion then that if Dean was willing to wear the horrendous colors, it meant he wouldn’t forget his little brother. At the time, he’d had the irrational fear that he would never see Dean again.

“So?” he insisted when his brother didn’t answer right away and kept rubbing at his eyes like a little kid. Then, remembering the kind of circumstances that usually brought Dean to his doorstep: “Are you hurt?” Dean didn’t seem hurt, but Sam still looked him up and down. There was no tear or stain anywhere on his clothes, no bruises on the visible patches of skin other than a purple one on his cheek.

“Nah, I’m fine.”

“You didn’t bring any critter back from your job, did you? I don’t want a repeat of your werewolf stalker from three months ago.” It was the only hunt Sam had taken part in, and he still had the scars to show for it; of course, his mom had no idea it had ever happened.

Dean rolled his eyes. “Quit the paranoia, dude. I wasn’t even on a hunt tonight. I—”

The door to the room opposite from Sam’s opened, and one of Sam’s roommates, Alex, stood silhouetted in the crack, his hair mussed from sleep. “Waz goin’ on?” His eyes wandered around the room and when they stopped on Dean, his mouth twisted in annoyance. “Sam, man, you know you can’t have your brother here. Not after last time.”

“Alex, hey.” Dean wriggled his fingers. “Glad to see you too, buddy.”

Sam silenced his brother with a glare. “Don’t think I can’t see that Lizzie’s in your bed from here,” he said to Alex. “It’s been over two weeks. So you don’t lecture me about guests, okay?”

Alex scowled, but disappeared into his room without another word, walking backward and blocking their view with his body like he could still deny the truth in Sam’s words. After the door closed Sam shared a look with his brother and they both snickered. 

“Okay,” Sam said, serious again. “Why did you come in the middle of the night? Ever heard of a phone call?”

“Er, I was close by, and I thought, ‘Hey, I haven’t seen my little brother in a while, I should pay him a visit. He’ll be happy to see me for sure. By the time I found a parking spot…”

“ _Dean_.”

“Okay, okay.” Dean raised his hands in surrender. “I think there’s something going on at your campus.”

“Something?”

Dean arched an eyebrow. “Yeah, _something_.”

“Oh.” Sam looked around. Alex was probably still awake, and any of his other roommates could show up at any moment. The downside of living on-campus was certainly the lack of privacy. “Right. Bathroom, then.”

They went to the bathroom and Dean looked into the shower, opening and closing the sliding door until Sam slapped his wrist. “Nice,” Dean said.

“You’ve been in here before.”

“Don’t remember it.”

Indeed, the only time Dean had used that shower he’d been concussed as hell, barely able to stand on his own, forcing Sam to help him out. His roommates had thought Dean was merely drunk and they had _not_ enjoyed being disturbed in the middle of the night, to say the least. By regularly covering their shift of cooking and cleaning—a contractual obligation to stay in the scholarship hall—every time Dean showed up, Sam had been able to keep them off his back for a while. But eventually it hadn’t been enough and Alex had put his foot down—the last straw had been the aforementioned werewolf stalker, which Sam’s roommates had thought to be your garden-variety psycho. On the one hand, Sam couldn’t really blame Alex: how could he explain Dean to any of them, Dean with his odd hours, shady looks, and suspicious wounds? They had to think he was part of the mob or something. On the other hand, being defensive of his brother had been Sam’s default mode for years.

“What’s this _thing_ you wanted to tell me about?” Sam asked, shaking off the memory of his brother showing up bloody on his doorstep.

“Okay, so there’s this hunter chick I met at Harvelle’s—” Sam raised his eyebrows and Dean groaned. “Come on, Sammy, get your mind out of the gutter. We shared a few drinks. Believe me, I think she’d chop my balls off before she did the nasty with me.” He sounded almost indignant about it and Sam suppressed a grin. “Anyway, she came to me with a possible gig… Wait a sec, I got it here.”

Dean slid a hand inside his jacket and came up with a newspaper clip that he handed to Sam. “It happened here,” he said uselessly, because Sam’s eye had already caught the words: ‘Kansas University;’ ‘Lawrence;’ and ‘Margaret Amini,’ the women’s hall, sister to K.K. Amini, Sam’s own hall. They shared a courtyard, so Sam didn’t need to read the article to know what it was about.

“Yeah, I know about this. The girl who killed herself.”

“Did you know her?”

“Not really.” 

The only clear memory Sam had of that girl—Rachel was her name, as far as he remembered—was of a tiny blonde crouching to the ground to pick up a book that had dropped from Sam’s bag. He’d thanked her, she’d smiled blindingly at him, he’d thought for a moment about asking her out for coffee, hadn’t dared to follow through, and then he’d been caught up in school work and hadn’t thought about her again until he heard that she’d thrown herself off her hall’s second floor. He shook his head and said, “I don’t see what this has to do with… your kind of thing.”

“You can call it by its name, you know. It’s not gonna bite you. And if you’d tried to read the article you’d see that she wasn’t alone when she jumped: one of her roommates was there and they were talking to each other when Rachel just ‘stood up and walked to the window, opened it, and jumped.’ Does it sound like normal suicidal behavior to you?”

Sam had talked—or rather, exchanged a few words—with some of Rachel’s friends, and all they’d said was that Rachel wasn’t depressed, that they didn’t understand, she never would’ve done something like this…. It had sounded like normal denial to him.

“Suicide is hardly normal behavior in the first place. Who can say what was going through her mind?” That was weak and he knew it; _Dean_ knew it, but was kind enough not to give him shit about it.

“Well, I’m not a shrink, but I know when something doesn’t sound right.”

“What do you want from me?” 

Dean had tried to get him to hunt with him before and it wasn’t that Sam never thought about it. Not full time, but maybe on the weekends or something. He’d helped his brother, even his mother, research hunts before and he did like some aspects of the job. He just didn’t know if he had it in him to lead a double life like his mom did, or to withdraw from normal society, like Dean did. And to think about how Mom would feel about it, the letdown it would be for her to have both of her kids get into hunting…. So he didn’t consider it too much.

He saw on Dean’s face that he was thinking along the same lines: Dean’s mouth pursed, he looked down, and smiled wryly. “Don’t worry your pretty head. I’m not gonna drag you away from your books. Just thought I’d give you a heads up, since this is basically taking place next door to you.” He buried his hands in his jacket pockets and bumped one shoulder into Sam. “You’ll need to be careful. You have to—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Salt the doors and windows, refresh the wards. The guys are gonna think I’m crazy but what else is new. You be careful too.” His stomach did a little flip as he said it. “Where are you staying?”

“A motel, not too far.” Dean shot him a suspicious look. “I’m not saying _there_. You know that.”

Sam raised both hands, palms turned outward. “Hey, I didn’t say anything.”

If only he could get Mom and Dean in the same room and bash their heads together until they talked. 

\---

Mary bent to take off her shoes, then flexed her toes, working out the aches from the long day at work. She walked barefoot on the cold tiles across the living room and up to the kitchen, wanting to get herself something to drink. The phone started ringing and she had to backtrack with a sigh.

“Hello?”

A low chuckle vibrated into her ear. “Bad time?”

“I’m just getting back from work, Bill. What do you want?”

“It’s always no pleasantries with you, isn’t it? For the record, this is _not_ one of the things I like about you.”

Mary pinched the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes. Was he flirting with her? Bill tended to sound flirty even when he didn’t intend to, so she was never quite sure. It didn’t help that they had slept with each other on occasion, which Mary persisted in thinking was a bad idea when they were both so hung up on their dead spouses.

She realized that she’d remained silent too long when Bill spoke again: “You’re right, this isn’t a social call. Ash found something.”

“What’s ‘something’? Is it a hunt? I don’t know, I’ve been really tired lately and I’m not sure— ”

“You’ll want to hear about this one, Mary. I promise. This is about the fires.”

The fires. Two magic words, if there were any. But she’d been disappointed often enough that she kept her voice unconcerned when she asked, “On a scale of one to ten—with one being a vague tale of someone’s grandmother dying in a fire and ten being a real breakthrough—how do you rank Ash’s ‘something’?”

“It’s a twelve, minimum. Ash thinks he’s found a pattern between—It’ll be easier to explain in person. When can you come to the Roadhouse?”

She started to say, ‘not before the weekend,’ because she had work on Thursday and Friday and she’d gotten used to planning her hunts around her job, trying to make it so her life was as normal as possible and hunting was just… some sort of bizarre hobby. But. A real _breakthrough_. This hunt, investigation—no, this _quest_ —was what had pulled her back into the life. If it hadn’t been for the yellow-eyed demon killing John and maybe doing something to Sam, she would have been happy letting other hunters deal with the monsters out there. She’d had enough of that growing up to last her a lifetime. If only pretending she was normal hadn’t ended with her life in ashes.

“Tomorrow. I’ll call in sick for work and I’ll leave first thing tomorrow.”

“Okay. I’ll be expecting you then.”

After hanging up Mary stayed by the phone for a moment, with her toes curling against the hard floor, her hands fluttering with no purpose at her sides. She’d come back from work with a pretty clear outline for her evening—dinner and wine, then a book in bed—and now she felt aimless—or rather, pulled into too many directions at the same time. She sprung into action suddenly, making a beeline for her office. It was Dean’s old room, where she’d installed shelves, file cases, and a desk, and that she had pompously renamed. She always made herself use that new appellation, even in her mind. 

She rummaged through her files for the red cardboard folder where she kept everything she’d gathered for the last twenty-one years. She didn’t take any particular pains to hide it because she knew Sam would never dream of looking into the stuff she had in her office, so she found it quickly. It wasn’t labeled but the corners and edges were worn soft and it was stained with ink, coffee, and even a little bit of blood. As well-known as a beloved safety blanket. Twenty-one years and six months, almost to the day. She held it protectively against her chest, like she would hold her boys when they were babies. 

That night she dreamed of the fire, something that hadn’t happened to her in years. She dreamed she was in her bed, in their house from back then, and was hearing the squeaky sound of Sam’s whines coming from the baby monitor, marred with static. In the dream it made her feel anxious, whereas in reality she’d just been annoyed to find her sleep broken. She felt the bed move as John sat up on the edge, saying “I got it,” in a voice full of gravel from sleep. She’d fallen back to sleep when it really happened, but her dream self tried to move and talk, to tell John, “don’t go, I’ll do it,” do something to stop what was about to happen. But her arms, fingers, even her eyelids felt too heavy, and the bed was sucking her in and the covers molding to her body like a cast. She heard Dean’s high-pitched cry of “Daddy!” and that was when she woke up.

She sat in her bed, rubbed at her cheeks and found them wet with tears even though she hadn’t been aware she was crying. She couldn’t stop her mind from remembering what had happened next: her waking up abruptly, running first to Dean’s room, then to Sam’s, finding her husband pinned to the ceiling with blood dripping from his midsection. She’d just had enough time to grab Sammy from his crib and usher Dean out of the room before a stream of fire surged forth.

She got out of her bed, put on her robe, and as she tied it up on the front John’s pale face from that night imposed itself on her: looking down at her from the ceiling with wide terrified eyes, his mouth open on a soundless cry, right before the fire engulfed him whole. She’d forgotten a lot about her dead husband. She couldn’t remember the sound of his voice, his smell, and his features would’ve been blurry by now if not for the few pictures she’d managed to save from the fire. But that image of his face as he was dying remained crystal clear, etched on the surface of her memory with excruciating precision.

She wasn’t about to sleep now, so instead she went to her office, opened her old folder and examined the various documents inside under the yellow halo of her desk lamp. Newspaper clips about the fire, relaying the tragedy in stark, simple terms: _John Winchester, aged 29, burned to death in his house in Lawrence, leaving two young sons and a widow._ Reports from the Division of Fire Safety that determined that the fire had started with no external ignition source. Other newspaper clips, other fires; weather forecasts, painstakingly transcribed interviews that she’d realized over the years. She knew all those documents by heart although she hadn’t reviewed them in a long time. Rereading them now wasn’t about learning something new, not even so much about making sure she had all her facts straight, but more about reminding herself of her purpose.

She sat at her desk until the livid light of dawn filtered through the blinds, and after some perfunctory ablutions she got ready to start on the road. It was a six-hour drive up to the Roadhouse; counting the obligatory lunch break and gas break, she’d get there at around 2 or 3 in the afternoon.

She was already behind the wheel when the sun rose from behind the houses. She hadn’t made a drive this long in a while and the thought had exhausted her, but once on the road it felt sort of liberating. Entering Nebraska via I-70 W she flashed back to the very time first time she’d made this trip, with little Sammy and Dean huddled in the backseat. The brown plains of Kansas, the never-ending cornfields followed by wheat fields followed by ranch scrub, never failed to put both boys to sleep. Nebraska, barely greener, didn’t breach the monotony much, and when the boys had gotten older it had been hours of fights and cries and recriminations. 

It was warm and sunny when she arrived at the Roadhouse, birds chirping their happy springtime song. She parked in a cloud of dust next to the trucks lined up at the front. Chatting voices and laughter were coming out of the open door. Mary barely had the time to get out of her car before Bill appeared in the doorframe.

“Mary. You found your way.”

Subtly hinting at the fact that she hadn’t come in a long time. Mary snorted and didn’t reply, walking to him for a greeting hug. He pulled apart after a few seconds and held her shoulders, examining her like a proud parent. “You’re getting prettier by the year.”

She shoved at him playfully; she had to be getting old for that kind of corny one-liner to ignite a spark of pleasure inside her. She would never admit to the feeling, of course, nor would she tell him that he looked pretty damn good himself: as tall as John had been, but broader in the shoulders, he had a pleasant, smiling face, laughing lines at the corners of his eyes, and a shock of brown hair that didn’t show any gray—she suspected him of dyeing it.

“So, what’s the hurry?” she asked, proud of herself at how nonchalant she sounded.

Bill shot a glance inside the bar; from where she was standing Mary could see a line of crusty hunters slouched at the counter, talking to each other with alcohol-induced slurs. She caught bits and pieces of their conversations: _set the fucking thing on fire… I find silver works better for this… got the five-inch scar to prove it…_

“We’ll go somewhere private,” Bill reassured her.

They got inside; it was hot and stuffy, and smelled like sweat and gun cleaning detergent. They waded their way through the room, leaving echoing greetings in their wake: _‘Hey, Mary’; ‘Looking good, Winchester,’_ or _'Campbell'_ from those old enough to have known her father. Mary smiled and nodded, but didn’t try to initiate conversation; hunting remained an overwhelmingly male profession, and unsubtle attempts at hitting on her were par for course, but she wasn’t in the mood for that tonight.

Bill stopped at the bar and knocked on the counter to draw the attention of the young blond woman reordering the liquor bottles. 

“Hey, Jo.”

Jo Harvelle twirled around to the sound of her father’s voice, making her blond ponytail flop back and forth. “Yeah? Hey, what’s up, Mary?”

Mary forced a tight smile. “Business as usual.”

“How’s Sam? I forgot to wish him a happy birthday.”

Mary gave her a succinct account of what Sam had been up to recently. She was getting antsy, impatient to get down to the real reason of her coming. Bill must have picked up on it because he cut the conversation short: “Jo, can you try and find Ash? Dig him up from whatever hole he’s stumbled into, tell him Mary’s here and we’re taking it upstairs.”

“Will do, Dad.”

Mary gave the girl a last smile and followed Bill upstairs to the Harvelle’s apartment above the bar.

“Something to drink?” Bill asked, already heading for his liquor cabinet. 

“No, thanks.” She wanted to keep a clear mind. “How long has Jo been working at the bar?”

“A few months. It’s a deal we have: she helps me with the bar, and I take her on a hunt with me from time to time.”

Mary bit her lip to hold back the comments she burned to make. Bill knew her too well, though: “If we didn’t have this arrangement, she would just do it behind my back. I’d much rather have her where I can keep an eye on her.”

“I just would’ve thought, with what happened to her mother—”

There was a thud as Bill put down the bottle he’d been holding, and Mary regretted her words. It was easy, watching Bill’s cheerful ways, to forget the kind of darkness that had fallen onto him in the past. Losing a loved one to the supernatural was an experience many hunters shared; having to _kill_ them was a different story.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was out of line.”

They’d been friends long enough that they could let that kind of thing roll. Mary saw Bill’s shoulders slump a little, losing their hard line. “Mary,” he said, “this wasn’t a dig at your parenting skills. My relationship with Jo is different from your relationship with Dean.”

It was her turn to tense. “I wouldn’t have taken it that way if you hadn’t felt like you had to mention it.”

“I just think that—”

“ _Bill._ Not in the mood.”

Bill let a beat pass. “Okay.” He went to sit on the chair opposite to her, holding a glass of some amber-colored beverage. “I haven’t seen him in a few months, but he’s doing fine from what I heard. Nailed that Wendigo in Blackwater.”

She wasn’t too proud to take advantage of Bill’s connections in the hunting world to keep tabs on how her son was doing. She didn’t acknowledge Bill’s information with more than a nod, feeling vaguely regretful she’d refused Bill’s offer for a drink: it would have given her something to do with her hands.

“What did Ash find out?”

“I think it’s better if—” There was a crashing sound from the stairs. “There he is.”

The door that separated the landing from Bill’s living room opened, and Ash appeared, a disheveled lanky figure in sleeveless shirt and ratty jeans. He greeted Mary and from the slur in his voice she knew he was a little drunk. Alcohol never seemed to affect his abilities any, so she refrained from showing her distaste.

Ash was carrying a laptop under his arm, a huge thing with no case, its bare wires visible. It looked like it was held together with a spit and a prayer. Ash flopped into a chair and opened the laptop, which came to life with a whooshing sound.

“Remember the fires you asked me to investigate?” Ash liked to go straight to business, and Mary could appreciate that. His fingers flew over his keyboard, his eyes flicking left and right.

“Yeah. Fire in nurseries, six-month old babies, dead parents.” They’d known about those for a while; obviously, the yellow-eyed demon had been busy. She anticipated underwhelming information and steeled herself against disappointment. 

“I kept looking for other deaths of that kind beside ’83. Found a bunch of them, every decade or so—it’s not completely regular. Went back to the early fifties.”

“I know that,” Mary said. She hadn’t known just how far it went back, but she was growing impatient.

“Listen to the rest of it,” Bill said.

“I thought about your theory, you know—” Ash stifled a burp with a closed fist. “Sorry; threw up a little in my mouth. You know, your theory that it wasn’t the parents that were important, but the babies. So I kept track of what was happening to the most recent generations. And guess what: five names belonging to one of those lists showed up together… Look for yourself.”

Ash turned the laptop so that Mary could see the screen and the article he had loaded. She leaned and squinted her eyes, skimming through it: a bunch of dead bodies had been found on the grounds of an abandoned farm in Jerome, Arizona, and evidence pointed to murders. One hypothesis was that the people had actually killed each other.

“I’m counting seven names,” Mary said.

“Yeah, two of them had a completely fire-free history. But the other five had lost parents in a fire when they were six-month old. That’s a pattern. They came from different places, different backgrounds, and at no point their paths seem to have crossed. Not until they died together, that is.”

Ash shot her a droopy-eyed glance above the lid of his laptop; Bill was looking at her too, both hands wrapped around his glass. They were probably both watching for her reaction, waiting for her to say or do something. Congratulate them for their hard work, maybe? Or freak out? Mary’s heart was pounding inside her chest, but she wasn’t sure what she was feeling. This _was_ a breakthrough; progress, finally, after years of not making any headway, so she should be glad, she should be feeling the narrow focus that came with the return of her purpose. Instead what made her chest hurt was more akin to dread. Fear. She looked at the grainy photo that came with the article: the dilapidated wooden house with its empty windows cut out to the façade, black holes like a skull’s eye sockets, standing in a vast field of bushes and wild grass, the skeleton of other buildings silhouetted in the background.

“Mary?” 

Bill’s soft tone told her she had been silent too long. She smiled and said, “It’s great. Thanks for the good work, guys.”

Something—the demon?—had taken those people and brought them to their death. Forced them to fight each other, or assassinated them, one or the other. She couldn’t let something like that happen to Sam.

“We need to see if this has happened before, and if we can find something tying all those people together, other than the fires. It can’t be random; it has to be looking for something. We need to be talking to those kids, maybe to their parents too. We—”

“Mary,” Bill cut her in. “What’s going on?”

“What? You know as much as I do.”

Bill put his glass down on the floor. He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. “Do I? I always figured you knew more than you were letting on. If I’m going to get more involved in this, I want to know everything you know.”

In the background, sounding far, far away, Mary heard Ash shut his computer and say, “I think there’s a beer calling my name downstairs.”

She waited for him to leave the room before she said in a breath, “It’s a demon.”

“How do you know? Did you find sulfur on the scene?”

“No, there… there wasn’t much left after the fire. I know because I’ve met him before. It. But it’s not a normal demon: it has yellow eyes, and it’s powerful.”

Bill looked her in the eye intensely for what felt like a very long time. “You met it. What do you mean by that? Did you _talk_ to it? Fight it? Were you…” he swallowed, seeming to struggle to let the word out, “were you possessed?”

“No, no,” she said. “Nothing like that. But the truth is…” She hesitated; she hadn’t breathed any of this to a soul in over thirty years. “I don’t _remember_.”

\---

Dean liked to think that he wasn’t still mad at his mother; it was just that they didn’t talk. It was a thing that happened. You grew up, you got your own purpose, and sometimes it was something different from what your parents wanted for you and you drifted apart. That was just life. But if he was perfectly honest with himself—and he tried to be as little as possible—he could feel that little ball of anger buried inside him, smoldering like embers under ashes. Not so much because she wouldn’t let him hunt, which was what Sam thought it was all about; no, it was the rest, the unspoken parts of their past, the half-truths. The yellow-eyed man. He was real, and Dean couldn’t forgive his mother for trying to pass him off as a childish nightmare.

So why was he giving the same half-truths to Sam? Well, the kid had made it clear he didn’t want to have anything to do with hunting, at least as little as possible when you’re born to a hunter family.

“ _Dean_.” 

The whisper was followed with a pointy elbow to his ribs, and Dean had to keep himself from wincing. Vivian glanced at him sideway, her face pinched with disapproval. Dean wanted to try his best shit-eating grin on her, see how far he could push before she blew up. Only, they were in public and working a job, and as much as he hated to admit it, she was right to call him out on daydreaming.

He straightened in his seat, a soft blue Ottoman that was too low for him to sit comfortably, forcing him to almost have his knees up to his chest. They were sitting in one of the Margaret Amini Hall’s common rooms, and a few of the residents were sitting opposite them, huddled against each other on a comfy-looking couch.

“What kind of newspaper are you working for?” one of them asked, her brow furrowed with just a touch of suspicion. She was a small, round girl with shiny black hair and brown skin, and from the way she had taken charge of the conversation as soon as Dean and Vivian had arrived, she was obviously some kind of informal leader here. That meant she was the one they had to convince of their good faith and the others would probably take their cue from her.

“We’re freelance writers,” Dean answered smoothly. “We usually submit our articles to a bunch of local newspapers. We’re interested in Rachel’s story because we would like to underline how much stress students are put under.” Now he was talking out of his ass—he _had_ gone to college, technically for almost two semesters, but he was almost always skipping class in favor of hunting so he couldn’t claim to be an expert on college life. Him bailing out had been the last straw for his mom.

“What we want you to understand, is that we mean no disrespect to Rachel’s memory,” Vivian said in a softly modulated voice that Dean didn’t recognize; he almost did a double take, wondering if his partner had been switched with a stranger without him realizing it. “We’re not trying to piggyback onto your friend’s death and make profit out of it. We’re just trying to get your version of the story out there. If the article does get written and approved by a newspaper, we’ll be writing under your control. We won’t say anything in it that you don’t approve of.”

The girls looked at each other, but Vivian’s words seemed to have worked magic because Dean could already see that they were relaxing. The girl who had acted as in charge so far said, “I’m Amy. What do you want to know?”

Maybe the girls felt better talking to Vivian because she was a woman, but whatever it was Dean decided to let her conduct the interview. As soon as he felt that the focus wasn’t on him anymore, he stood up and started walking around, studying the room with a thoughtful air. In its center, where they were sitting, couches and chairs formed a square, with a round table in the middle. The color pattern was soft and soothing, all grays, greens, and blues, sky colors. This part of the room had a very high ceiling, shaped like the roof, and was cut off from the rest by a series of pillars. There was a piano, some bookshelves, and multiple framed pictures that Dean studied while keeping an ear out for the conversation.

“Was Rachel depressed?” Vivian was asking. 

“I didn’t know her that well,” Amy said, “so maybe I’m not the best person to judge. No one saw it coming, though, not even her closest friends.”

“She never would’ve tried to kill herself!” one of the other girls piped up.

Vivian asked her why she was convinced of this, and Dean listened to the answer, but the girl—a roommate—didn’t have much else to support her claim other than the fact that Rachel was _‘such a joyful person,’_ and _‘always had a smile on her face.’_ As if only gloomy people ever killed themselves. Dean focused on the pictures lined up on top of the piano: smiling girls holding an empty frame, girls in various sport competitions, other pictures obviously taken at a party. Only girls were photographed, probably residents, save for the occasional male figure in the background. Dean snickered at the guy in one of the pictures awkwardly standing at the periphery of a group of girls, obviously taken in the act of ogling them, frozen with his shoulders slumped and his hands buried in his pockets for posterity to see.

“Did Rachel have trouble sleeping?” Dean heard Vivian ask, and this made him pay attention again. “Bad dreams, nightmares?”

“Not that I knew of… Girls?”

None of the other girls had heard anything about Rachel having nightmares. Dean felt the sting of disappointment, but he still got his EMF reader out of his pocket, angling his body so that no one could see what he was doing. The device remained stubbornly dark and silent.

“We didn’t learn anything we didn’t know,” Dean complained to Vivian as they left the hall. They walked past KK Amini Hall and Dean couldn’t help but look at the window to see if he could get a glimpse of his brother. “The girls don’t know anything. There’s no EMF in there. Are you sure you got your facts straight about the yellow-eyed man?”

“I’m sure I remember my guy talking about it,” Vivian snapped, but she looked troubled. Her account of meeting a student from KU who’d talked about someone dreaming of a yellow-eyed man was murky at best, and Vivian didn’t strike Dean as someone who let herself drink to the point of blacking out parts of a conversation.

“Rachel’s death could be completely unrelated. It could be something else—a haunting.”

“You said there was no EMF.”

“Not in the common room—but this isn’t where Rachel died. And a lot of ghosts get sleepy during daytime.”

She looked at him, thoughtful. “We need to go back and have a look at her room. What about her roommates? Not just the girl who shared her room, but the other residents—I doubt they will let us check her room, so we need to do that when there’s no one to interrupt us.”

She didn’t sound like she thought he’d said something stupid, but like she was inviting him to her thinking process, waiting for him to bounce back and come up with ideas. Dean felt a weird rush of warm pride at that. He’d never had a partner before so the feeling took him by surprise: it was nice to be treated like he was at least semi-competent at his job, and not a pale substitute for Mary Winchester, born Campbell, hunter of long-time fame.

“I guess I could…” Someone bumped into his shoulder and Dean let out a surprised yelp. “Hey! Look where you’re going, pal.”

The offender, a scrawny kid with curly hair looking about Sam’s age, raised his hands and said, “Sorry, man.”

“Okay.” _Don’t bully the college kids._ “It’s fine.” 

He turned back to Vivian, but the incident had made him uncomfortably aware that they were talking in the open. “I can maybe ask Sam—that’s my kid brother, he lives in the Men’s Hall next to Margaret Amini—if he can work something. But we should…”

“Take it somewhere private, yes.”

Sam wouldn’t mind, would he? Dean wasn’t asking him to take part in the hunt. But… yeah, this was probably more involvement than he wanted to have. On the other hand, this was happening right next to him, which meant it had become personal. The cognitive dissonance Sam usually lived with couldn’t impede that.

Something was nagging at Dean, though, something he couldn’t put his finger on. The unsettled feeling lasted all day, but he never managed to pinpoint its source.

\---

Sam poured himself another glass of punch and sighed. The music pounded in a tribal rhythm, and people around him laughed and danced and drank, no one caring that almost half of the crowd was under twenty-one. It brought back memories of how his brother used to get openly shitfaced as a teenager to piss off their mom; in reaction, Sam hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol before his twenty-first birthday.

“Hey, Sam!” someone yelled right into his ear. 

Sam managed to control his startled reaction pretty well, he thought. “Yeah?”

“Pretty great idea you got here!”

His roommates had been a little surprised that he’d be the one to suggest a party with the girls from Margaret Amini. He liked to party as much as the next college guy, but he was usually just following along. The tricky part had been to make sure the girls would all be there, and no one would stay behind at the house, but fortunately it was Friday and midterms were still a few weeks away. It had worked out in the end. 

“Are you sweet on one of the Maggie chicks or something?”

Sam barely contained an eye roll, raised his cup, and said, “Enjoy the party, dude!” before working his way into the crowd, which was now swaying back and forth to some whiny love song. He wasn’t up for his roommates’ teasing; his insides had been curling with low-grade anxiety since the beginning of the party. Were Dean and his partner done yet? What if one of the girls wanted to go home early, or had forgotten something in her room? What if there really _was_ a ghost in there and it had killed Rachel?

The music changed again for something more energetic and Sam got elbowed in the process, spilling some of his drink on his shirt.

“Shit.”

He heard someone laugh and say, “sorry!” and he waved the apology off, retreating to the periphery of the room to look for a napkin he could use. He reached one of the tables they’d lined against the walls: it was littered with empty cups and bottles, bowls and chips crumbs, but he found a wrinkled napkin that looked clean enough and started to dab at the stain. He was focused on his task, fussing at his shirt in a way that Dean would surely make fun of, but when there was a lull in the music he heard a soft sniff coming from somewhere on his right. He looked up and there, huddled in one of the armchairs they had pushed in the corners, was a red-haired girl who was wiping her cheeks with her hand.

For a few seconds, Sam was torn between leaving her alone and going to her to try and comfort her. Then he recognized her—she was Rachel’s roommate, the one who had been with her when she died—and he was torn again between getting involved or staying as far away as he could from this hunt.

“Hey. Are you okay?”

The girl had seen him coming and did her best to dry her face and look like she hadn’t been crying. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“I’m sorry, it was a stupid question.”

This time she smiled. “It’s okay. No one knows what to say. I’m getting used to it.”

“I’m Sam, by the way.” He leaned against one of the pillars that separated the back of the room from the rest of it, keeping enough distance between them that she didn’t feel crowded. “This party was my idea. I don’t know if it’s the best I’ve had.”

“Oh, no, it’s—don’t mind me. It’s a great idea. The girls needed the distraction, it was getting stifling in the house. I just felt down for a moment. And, um, I’m Vicky.”

“Hi, Vicky.” He let a beat pass. “You don’t have to justify yourself, you know. It’s only been a few weeks. No one can blame you for…. She was your friend. I’m sorry, maybe you don’t want to talk about it.”

Vicky shrugged with one shoulder rather than give him another variation on _‘it’s okay.’_ For a moment she remained silent, looking down at her lap. Sam thought she really was going to stop talking about it, even though he _wanted_ her to talk, and he felt terrible about the whole situation. How did his mom and Dean handle this?

“Of course I’m sad,” she said suddenly, so low that Sam could barely hear her over the music. “But it’s not just that. Everyone says they get it, it’s normal for me to be sad, I should take my time to grieve, but no one wants to…. No, forget it.”

“What?”

“Forget it. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying.” She let out a strangled chuckle that sounded horribly like she was going to cry again.

“What is it?” Sam took one step towards her and spoke softly, both to keep her talking and to avoid being overhead. He felt like he was getting to the heart of the matter and his mouth was dry with the fear he would say the wrong thing and ruin it. “Is it about what you said to the paper?”

Her head whipped up. “You read about it?”

“Yeah, sorry. I skimmed through the article.”

“I know how it sounds. All the girls would rather pretend I never said anything. But then they also don’t believe Rachel killed herself. I think some of them….”

“Do _you_ believe Rachel killed herself?”

“Yes. No. I mean.” She wrung her hands, bending her wrists to an awkward angle that had to hurt. “I saw her do it. No one pushed her. I was _there_. But….”

Sam’s head was starting to hurt mildly, maybe because of the music, but he did his best to push that feeling aside and resisted the urge to rub his temple. “What happened?” He feared he’d gone too far, sounded too intent, so he added hurriedly: “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But… you know, some things are easier to tell people who aren’t close to you. And I kind… I kinda get it. My dad also died in strange way and… well, I generally don’t talk about it.”

“What happened to your dad?”

Sam winced a little at the question, but he’d been the one to bring it up. “He died in a fire. That started in my nursery. But they could never really figure out how the fire had started, or why my father was burned to ashes but _I_ didn’t get hurt at all.” He left out the ‘pinned-on-the-ceiling’ part because that was a little too freaky, as well as Dean’s tales of a yellow-eyed man because... well, Dean had only been four at the time.

“That sounds… yeah. Rachel…” Vicky swallowed. “We were talking. Nothing deep, it was like—class, assignments, parents, boys. The usual. I wasn’t even really looking at her, because I was doing my homework at the same time and not paying too much attention to the conversation. She stopped talking suddenly, just… right in the middle of a sentence. Then I heard her push her chair back, like she was getting up, and that’s when I looked. Her face was… like nothing I’ve ever seen. She just walked straight to the window, opened it, and jumped. I was—”

She shut her mouth so fast that Sam thought he heard her teeth click. She stood up like a shot and Sam had a movement of recoil, but not enough to avoid her slapping him so hard he bit his tongue and tasted blood.

“Leave me alone!” she yelled, her face twisted with fury. Not even a second later her eyes opened wide and she started trembling. Without another word, she spun around and dived into the crowd.

Sam stood there a moment, a hand to his throbbing cheek, too stunned to move.

“What did you do to her?” a girl called out, a diminutive brunette who looked furious enough to gouge his eyes out.

“Nothing!” Sam squeaked, waving his hands in denial. “We were just talking and she just….” _Cut herself off. Suddenly stood up._

The girl cast him a deeply doubtful look, but after a moment of hesitation she went after Vicky. Sam waited until he stopped being the center of attention and the crowd filled the empty space Vicky had created by blowing up. He fished his phone from his pocket and speed-dialed his brother. “ _Dean_ ,” he hissed into the phone. “Get your butt over here. _Immediately_.”

\---

It probably didn’t say good things about her that Mary, after all those years, still got a complex out of visiting Karen Singer’s house. She’d gotten the last leg of driving through South Dakota; her back hurt and her eyes burned, and the vision of Karen’s manicured lawns, the colorful flowers bordering her driveway, the bright blue paint of her house with the windows trimmed with white, the perfection of it all twisted something inside Mary. Twelve-year-old jealousy, stupid and petty. God, look at the flowerpots suspended under the porch, symmetrically arranged so they were framing the windows, Jesus _fucking Christ._

She could feel Bill glancing at her curiously, then around her so he could look at the house. He and Karen knew each other, but not very well as far as Mary was aware. They both had their fingers on the loose hunting community’s pulse, so it was natural that they’d be in contact, but even though Bill often directed his hunter patrons here, he obviously had never actually seen the house.

“Nice place,” he commented with a slow whistle. “Suburban perfection.”

“Yeah,” Mary said, pushing the door on her side. “Wait until you have a look at the interior.”

Karen welcomed them with exclamations of delight and hugs for them both. Her looks were as perfect as her house: blond curls that looked almost sculpted and a prim yellow dress. Mary’s hair was tied up in a messy bun to keep it off her face while she drove, and she felt wrinkled and sticky from the journey. But her resentment melted in Karen’s arms and warm greeting—no one could really hate Karen for long.

“How’s Sam?” Karen asked as she led them to her living room. 

She retreated to her kitchen to make them coffee, but the wall separating the two rooms had an opening cut-out in it, so Mary knew she could still hear her answer.

“He’s doing very good. It won’t be long before he graduates, and then he’s looking to a Master of Journalism.” 

“He always did so well in school.” Mary heard the _sshhh_ of the coffee-maker coming from the kitchen. “Bill, do you take sugar in your coffee?”

Bill took his coffee bitter and black as tar. Karen made a quip about hunters and their punishing drinks. Mary looked at the pictures in the living room, framed in black on a white wall: pictures of Karen’s parents, of various hunters that had taken refuge here over the years. Mary noticed that the one picture of her with the boys when they were small had disappeared, to be replaced by a more recent picture of Sam and Mary at Sam’s high school graduation. Above the chimney mantel, in its rightful privileged position, was a picture of Karen’s wedding with her late husband. One of the reasons why Mary could never resent Karen too much was that she and Karen had so much in common.

Karen came back to the living room with two cups of coffee. “Dean was here a few weeks ago.”

Mary accepted her cup with a murmured thanks and blew the steam away. Hunters generally came to Karen when they needed some R&R, especially when they were injured. Karen’s place was free, discreet, and had better accommodation than most motels out there.

“He was?”

Karen made another run to her kitchen to get them cookies. When she came back, she said, “He wasn’t badly hurt, just a few bruises and scratches. Nothing he couldn’t have handled on his own.” Satisfied that her guests didn’t need anything else, she sat down in one of her leather-covered armchairs; Mary noticed that she had tied a white apron around her waist. “Honestly, I think he just wanted some company. And… I think he wanted it to get back to you.”

Karen’s expression was carefully contained, devoid of any judgment but also of any sympathy, because she knew Mary wouldn’t welcome it. Even though they’d had a similar conversation not so long before, Bill looked uncomfortable, holding awkwardly the tiny porcelain cup in his large hands.

“Thanks for the news,” Mary said, leaning forward to pick a cookie from the plate. 

Karen smiled, recognizing her cue. “So to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

“Bill and I are onto something. Something big. Have you heard hunters talk about a yellow-eyed man?”

Karen pursed her lips in thought. “Wait a minute,” she said, lifting a finger.

She came back a few minutes later with a black leather-bound notebook and started to leaf through the pages. Karen meticulously wrote down everything hunters told her, and Mary knew she had boxes of similar notebooks. “Ah, here it is. This hunter came here a few months ago—a young man named Matthew Cohn, I don’t think you know him—and told me the story of a hunt he’d done: a telekinetic boy, Max Miller, killed his father and uncle because they abused him. He later killed himself before Matthew could do anything about it. Matthew told me the boy had confessed to having dreams of a yellow-eyed man.”

Mary and Bill looked at each other. “How did Cohn come across this hunt? Strange death in the papers or…?”

“No, I think I remember…” Karen squinted at the page; she probably needed glasses, but claimed she never had the time to go to the doctor. “No—he said a young woman came to him claiming she had a vision of the first death. Matthew didn’t believe her until Jim Miller died trapped in his garage from carbon monoxide poisoning. Just the way the girl had described it.”

“What’s the girl’s name?” Mary asked. 

“Ava Wilson.”

Mary’s fingers tightened around the handle of her cup. She knew by heart all the names of the kids whose parents had burned in 1983. “She’s one of them,” she murmured at Bill’s intention. 

“I thought the kids who died in Arizona had never crossed paths,” Bill answered in the same tone.

“Could be that the pattern’s changing. Or that they met before and kept it quiet, which would make sense, if some of them have… visions. I mean, not really the kind of things you want everyone to know about you.” Visions. Telekinesis. Mary tried to remember if Sam had ever done anything unusual. With his family’s background in hunting, would he be more or less likely to come to her if something like that happened to him?

Karen had followed their exchange in silence, with her eyes going back and forth between Mary and Bill, and it was only once they’d lapsed into silence that she said, “May I know what this is about?”

Coming here, asking Karen for information, Mary had known it would come down to this at one point, and she trusted Karen. Still, she found the words hard to muster. “Have you ever heard of a yellow-eyed demon?”

Karen became perfectly still, from her fingers to her unblinking eyes. Her husband’s possession being the event that had opened her eyes to the hunting world, she’d become very knowledgeable about demons over the years. “Yellow eyes, you say? I can’t say that I have. Low-level black eyes, and red eyes for crossroads demons, yes, but yellow? Not that I recall. Are you sure it’s a demon?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m sure.”

“Then it has to be a pretty powerful demon. One that doesn’t come out to the surface very often. This is… very troubling. It could mean that the barrier between Hell and our realm is weakening.”

Mary nodded. “That’s what I’m afraid of too.”

“What does it have to do with Max Miller and Ava Wilson?”

Mary told her. She told her everything about John’s death, about the kids and the fires, about the ones who’d killed each other in Jerome, Arizona. She even told her about Sam and her fears for him. Only one other person, Bill, knew as much as Mary, and she hadn’t told him the whole story in one go. It was hard and painful, but also liberating in a way, like getting a good cry out before you can go back to normal.

Karen was looking at her with a cool expression. “The man with the yellow eyes. This is the story Dean always told when he was a kid.”

“I know.”

“You always said it wasn’t true, that it was just a dream.”

“I know, Karen. Please. Don’t tell me that I screwed up because I know it all too well.”

A few months after his dad’s death, Dean had suddenly gone from mute to obsessed with the yellow-eyed man. She remembered him as he’d been then, little blond head and solemn eyes, telling her and whoever was listening about the man who had killed his father, a man with eyes that glowed like golden coins in a treasure chest. Her darling four-year old, who had witnessed his father’s murder.

“I thought—I. He was so young. If I could convince him it wasn’t real, I could keep him off the revenge path.”

The man with the yellow eyes. She remembered the stab of shock she’d felt the first time she heard her son’s description, how it coincided with her own hazy memories of that night when her parents had died. John, laying still and heavy in her arms; and a man with yellow eyes kissing her, the smell of sulfur on his breath making her want to gag. The knowledge that she’d done something to bring this down on her family. Who had she really wanted to protect? Dean, or herself? In the end, all she’d done was make him cling to his father’s memory: Dean wore his father’s jacket, drove his car, listened to his music. And he did his mother’s crappy, thankless job, which would consume his soul and send him to an early grave. What a bang-up job, Mary.

“I was wrong,” she pronounced very clearly, each word ringing like crystal notes. “I know that now. But what matters is that the yellow-eyed demon doesn’t get Sam, or any of those kids. Whatever he wants with them, it can’t be good. Bill and I were planning to go talk to the kids, but I’m wondering now if it’s the right thing to do. If those kids have…” she hesitated, unwilling to say the words for fear of making them true, “if they have some kind of psychic powers and a connection to the demon, it’s all too possible that talking to them will tip it off.”

Karen smoothed a hand over her wrinkle-less apron. “I can get a few hunters to investigate quietly, tell us what those kids have been up to lately. Do you have their names?”

“Yes,” Mary said. The list was in her bag but she didn’t need to get it out. “We can strike Max Miller off the list. You already know about Ava Wilson. Other names are Jake Talley and Scott Carey. That we know of; it’s possible that others are involved.”

“You can add Ansem Beckett to that list,” Bill said; he’d been so silent up to now that it almost startled Mary to hear him speak. 

“Who’s Ansem Beckett? I don’t know about this one.”

“Oh, Ash recently added him to the list. He doesn’t fit the pattern exactly, because he didn’t lose a parent to a fire—at least, not until recently.”

“What makes Ash think there’s a connection then?”

“There _was_ a fire in his nursery when he was six-month old, but his mother didn’t die—she got him out of the house in time. Unfortunately, he had a twin brother, Andy, who didn’t make it out.”

“You said his mother didn’t die until recently,” Karen said.

“Yes, a few months ago the mother, Holly, she, um—well, she set herself on fire.”

“She—what?” Mary said, imagining the scene in spite of herself. “On purpose?”

“That's what the witnesses said: she was at a gas station, and instead of filling up her car she doused herself in gasoline and lit up a match. Vrroumph.” Bill mimed the fire with his hands.

None of them said anything for a moment, digesting the information. Karen was the one to break the silence. “On that cheerful note,” she said. “I know a few hunters I can call immediately. Are you staying here tonight? I just made the bed in the blue room.”

Bill leered a little bit at the mention of the room, but stopped when Mary swatted his arm.

“We’ll stay,” she told Karen. “If you have another free room, that is.”

\---

“Are you sure it isn’t anything you said that pushed that girl over the edge?” Dean asked skeptically around a mouthful of his sandwich.

“Yes, I’m sure,” Sam said in a clipped tone. “And close your mouth, you’re disgusting. This was exactly like what she said happened to Rachel: she was talking, acting normal, and then she interrupted herself— _right_ in the middle of a sentence—to slap me and scream at me. This was… it was like she was under control or something.”

Dean looked at Vivian, searching her for a clue about her thoughts on the subject. They were having lunch at a restaurant outside of KU, the Café De La Place. The name had made Dean fear the worst—random French had to be the tidemark for pretentiousness—but the atmosphere was more casual than he’d thought it would be, with round tables and slat-back chairs, and the sun spilling cheerfully from the huge bay windows. The menu was mostly salads, though, and Dean had fallen back on the only sandwich he could find in it. Vivian hadn’t said anything in a while, playing with more than eating the black olives in her Greek salad.

“What do you think, Viv’?”

She looked up at him with a glare that sent the _‘never call me that again’_ message loud and clear. Sammy barely concealed his smirk. “I’m not sure what to think,” she said evenly. “It does sound like something was controlling Rachel and her roommate. Controlling, or possessing her.”

“What did you find when you went to their room?” Sam asked.

“Not much,” Dean said with a sigh, putting his sandwich down on his plate. “Nothing looked out of place, and there was some EMF but not enough to be conclusive. Ghosts are usually more active at night, but it wasn’t the case here.”

“And ghosts are usually bound to one place, right?” Sam said, his inner geekness winning against his disinterest in all things hunt-related. “But whatever it is has acted in at least two different places now.”

Dean caught Vivian looking covertly at his brother with an undecipherable expression, and although she hadn’t said anything he wondered if she was bothered by the presence of a non-hunter at the table, discussing the case. He hoped this wasn’t going to be a problem, because he secretly enjoyed the fact that Sam was getting more involved in this hunt, and he didn’t want her to ruin it

“It’s true that ghosts are usually bound to one place,” he said. “But exceptions aren’t unheard of. If enough of the person’s, uh, DNA is spread around different places, it can be enough for the ghost to hop from one to another.”

“You mean like… chopped body parts or something?” Sam’s nose wrinkled in disgust. “Gross.”

“Doesn’t have to be body parts, but yeah, that’s the idea. It could explain why there wasn’t much EMF in Rachel’s room, if the ghost was busy slapping you around with Vicky’s body.”

“If it’s even a ghost,” Vivian said. “What if it was something else? Like, a demon?”

Dean felt the word sink into his gut. “Demons are rare as fuck, though.”

“Doesn’t mean it can’t be one.”

No, it didn’t. Dean wasn’t about to admit that he didn’t feel ready at all to tackle a fucking _demon from Hell._

“We can still look into the buildings’ history,” Sam hazarded, probably picking up on Dean’s discomfort with a little brother’s spidey sense. “None of them are very old —K.K. Amini opened in 1992 and Margaret in 2000, so it shouldn’t be too much work. I can do it—it’d be less suspicious for me to be seen working at the library.”

They split as soon as they were done with lunch, all of them going back to the campus—Sam to look into the library’s archives, Dean and Vivian to try and find Rachel’s roommate Vicky—but separately to avoid being seen together. It was going to be hard enough to hide from Sam’s roommates, who would be able to identify him as Sam’s brother.

They were walking back to Dean’s car when Vivian suddenly stopped, going from on the move to statue-like stillness in a split second.

“What…?”

Vivian raised an imperious finger. “Ssshh!”

Dean smacked his lips together and mimed zipping his mouth shut. The joke was lost on Vivian, whose eyes, nervous and alert, flitted from the cars in the street, to the people walking past them, the buildings on their side and across the street. Dean tried to look for and listen for whatever had tripped her, but he could only hear normal street noises: cars buzzing by, footsteps beating on the sidewalk, snippets of conversation floating to them. 

Without warning, Vivian grabbed her gun from inside her jacket.

“What the fuck!”

Hands up to her face, gun pointed to the sky, Vivian made her way around the corner into a back alley. Dean followed her after a frantic look around, checking if anyone had seen her weapon and was about to call the cops on them.

The alley smelled faintly of piss and garbage; it was closed at the end by a wooden fence, and there was absolutely _nothing_ noteworthy going on here. Feeling like he’d shut up long enough, Dean was about to tell Vivian to quit it with the G.I. Joe act, when she dropped her arms and seamlessly put away her gun, swift like a magician doing a trick.

“It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?”

She didn’t say anything, looking deep in thought, and Dean stifled a frustrated sigh. “Do you think we were followed or something?” And who would follow them? Couldn’t be their ghost, it wasn’t the way ghosts worked. Unless of course they had it all wrong and today’s monster of the week was something completely different.

Vivian furrowed her brows until they made one V-shaped line. “Do you remember yesterday? When we came out of Margaret Amini after the interview?”

“Yeah?”

“You bumped into a student. He gave off a strange vibe, didn’t he?”

Now it was Dean’s turn to furrow his brow. “Maybe,” he said, straining to remember. He’d felt that odd warning tingle at the back of his mind all of yesterday, but for the life of him he couldn’t say where it came from.

“I don’t know, it’s that feeling… It’s reminding me of something.” Then all wrinkles smoothed from Vivian’s face. “I lost it.”

“Lost it? Lost _what_? Call me stupid, but I feel like I’m running uphill trying to follow this conversation.”

“I don’t know!” She turned around and briskly walked away, back to the street, and once again Dean had to jog after her.

“Hey!”

She stopped and waited for him, but he felt it was probably only because she had remembered he was the one with the car. “I felt something,” she said, “like we were being followed or watched—and it jogged my memory, but I lost the thread and now I can’t tell you what it was about. What I _can_ tell you is that something weird’s going on—I don’t think it’s just a normal haunting.” Her tone was brusque, and she looked annoyed at having to explain herself. Dean figured it was probably the closest he would get to seeing her sheepish.

“Okay,” he said. “Wasn’t so hard, was it? Words, everyone should learn how to use them.” Oh, Sammy would have a field day with this. “Since you’re in a caring and sharing mood, Viv’—”

“Yes, _Dean-o_?”

“When’re you going to tell me what the hell you want from me?”

They’d stopped in the middle of the sidewalk way, forcing the flow of passersby to part around them like the water of a river around a small island. “What do you mean?” Vivian said, lifting up her chin.

Dean used his eyebrows to tell her how unimpressed he was. “Come on. I may be pretty, but I ain’t stupid. I don’t think you brought me this case and are helping me with it out of the goodness of your heart, or because you liiiiike me so much.” He grinned mockingly. “So spill it: what do you want?”

Vivian crossed her arms over her chest and pressed her lips until they were colorless. “Why haven’t you told Sam about the yellow-eyed man?”

Dean ground his teeth at the avoidance, and let out a chuff of breath. “Because Sam doesn’t believe in the yellow-eyed man. Telling him about it would be a good way to ensure he doesn’t take this case seriously at all. Now it’s your turn.”

“Right. What I want is for you to use your connection at Harvelle’s to find something for me. A gun.”

“A gun? They say you can get one opening a bank account in Michigan. Didn’t you hear?”

“It’s an old gun made by Samuel Colt—it’s said it can kill anything. I’m sure a hunter has it, but—The thing is, I’m not welcome at Harvelle’s anymore. Bill didn’t seem to appreciate me kicking his patrons around.”

Dean threw his head back and laughed. He could just picture the scene. “I would’ve paid to see that. So a gun that can kill anything, huh?” It sounded like fairy tale bullshit to him, but he didn’t want to give her incentive to start kicking _him_ around. “What do you need to kill so badly?”

He could see her hesitate, weighing how much she needed him against her reluctance to share something of herself. “The vampire who killed my brother.”

“Huh. I thought vampires were extinct. Also, you don’t need a gun to kill a vampire. You just need to relieve the fucker of his head.”

“They’re not extinct, they just got better at hiding themselves. And this one is… tricky. Hard to approach.” The way she said it, it sounded like she’d given it more than a few tries. “If I could get this gun, I would be sure to kill him.”

“Why me? No other sucker lounging around at the Roadhouse?”

She smiled, showing too much teeth. “When I heard that college boy talking about the yellow-eyed man, I thought it was fitting. You’re getting revenge for your father, and I’m getting revenge for my brother.”

Yeah. It was o-so-poetic, a bloody tale fit for a hunter. “Revenge,” he said, feeling his throat tighten around the word. “Now served all day.”

\---

As Sam had predicted, looking into Margaret Amini Hall’s history didn’t take too much time, and K.K. Amini didn’t take much longer. The women’s hall had been built with the money of a KU graduate, Margaret Wenski Amini, and K.K. was named after her husband, who had graduated with her in ‘46. Architecturally speaking, the two halls were twin images of each other: both were red-brick buildings with a white triangular front and white-trimmed windows. 

Both buildings’ histories were as clean as sheets coming out of the washing machine. Sam was methodical in his research; this was something most of his professors had commented on. He didn’t stop when he couldn’t find anyone having died in the twin halls: he also checked any account of accidents or students going missing. He went as far as looking into deaths or disappearance of residents even outside of the buildings themselves, because it was always possible that one of them had died somewhere else but had left enough of themselves in the halls to start haunting them. But there was nothing in Margaret Amini until Rachel’s death, and in K.K. he only found about a few accidents that hadn’t gone beyond broken bones. 

“Can’t be a ghost, then,” Sam murmured, tapping the tip of his pencil on his notebook. “Unless it latched on to one of the residents?”

Why was he even wracking his mind over this hunt? Let Dean do the job he’d chosen for himself. Their mother had been raised in that world, but for Dean it had been a conscious, deliberate choice that had cost him his relationship with Mom—he’d _wanted_ to leave the light and step into the shadow. Sam didn’t think he was that brave, or that insane.

And yet here he was, taking notes, bullet point lists and arrows everywhere, side notes in the margin and all. He was as focused on this case as he ever was when he researched something for school. Maybe it was because Vicky’s face didn’t leave him: the broken look on her face as she struggled with her grief and her incomprehension, but also the sudden mad fury when she’d slapped him out of the blue. And that feeling he’d had right before she did it, that weird pressure behind his forehead, almost like….

A chair next to him squeaked as it scraped against the floor, a book was dropped on the table, and Sam was startled out of his focus. He glanced sideways to whoever it was, slightly annoyed. He’d been vaguely aware before of other students coming and going, whispering to each other, coughing, turning pages, but this intruder was louder than the rest and way closer to his personal space.

“Hey,” said the guy in question, greeting Sam with a wide smile like they were long time friends. Sam examined him: pretty short—though to Sam most people were—, curly hair, a hooked nose, and nervous eyes that shone just a little too brightly. Sam couldn’t remember having ever seen him before, and yet, he felt a curious feeling of familiarity, like maybe the guy reminded him of someone he knew.

“Sam, right?” the guy went on, and all kinds of alarm signals beeped in Sam’s mind. “What are you working on?”

“Nothing,” Sam said, closing his notebook and dropping it inside his bag on the floor. “Homework. Do we know each other? Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before.”

“No, we don’t. I mean, I’ve seen you around but we’ve never actually talked before. I know all about you, though.” There was a tremor of excitement in the guy’s voice that made unease creep along Sam’s spine. “About you and your brother. What’s his name again? Dean?”

Sam’s whole body tensed at his brother’s name, his fists clenching on his lap. He could feel the weight of his cell phone in his jeans pocket and wished he could reach it and covertly send Dean a text to warn him.

“How do you know that name?” Sam said through his teeth. “Who the hell are you?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Ansem.”

Sam feverishly sifted through his memories, but the name didn’t ring a bell at all. “How do you know about us?”

Ansem leaned closer, dragging his chair with him. No one around them seemed to pay them any mind, everyone engrossed in their work or in hushed conversations with their friends. One of Sam’s own friends walked by and waved his fingers at him. He was gone to the other side of the room, hidden behind rows of bookshelves, before Sam could even think to call for him so he wasn’t alone anymore with Ansem.

Ansem must have caught Sam’s panicked look because he chuckled and patted him on the shoulder. Sam shoved at his hand, but Ansem just chuckled again and said, “You don’t need to be afraid of me, Sam. Not you. We’re just having a friendly conversation.”

Sam relaxed the fingers of his right hand, and they hurt a little from how tightly he’d closed his fist, but he ignored the feeling and grabbed the lapel of Ansem’s jacket to draw him into his space. He’d worried about Dean before, had laid around in bed at night and let the thought of his brother maybe dying in a ditch somewhere nag at him; never, though, had he felt such protectiveness spark inside him. 

“Okay,” he said, almost nose to nose with Ansem. “So in all friendliness, tell me how _the fuck_ you know my brother’s name.”

He saw Ansem flinch almost imperceptibly and felt a dark feeling of satisfaction stir inside him. “Dude, relax, I’ll tell you. Just… let me go.” Sam didn’t move an inch. “Okay, okay. It was the yellow-eyed man.”

“What?” In surprise, Sam opened his fingers and Ansem pulled away, fussing over the wrinkles on his jacket. “What did you say?”

Behind them a girl burst out laughing, triggering a concert of annoyed ‘ _sssshhh_ ’s around her.

“The man with the yellow eyes.” Ansem’s eyes roved over Sam’s face, searching, and whatever he saw there made him smile smugly. “You don’t know anything, do you? You don’t know him. Well, Sam, _he_ knows _you_.”

Dean claimed a man with yellow eyes had killed their father. He’d made him a boogeyman all throughout Sam’s childhood, until their mother put a stop to it—back when Dean was fifteen or sixteen, and that was when the fights had started. Sam had always thought it was something his brother had made up to scare him.

“Ask Dean why he came here. Why he _really_ came here. I’m doing you a favor, Sam. I’m not the one you should be mad at.”

Upon these words Ansem stood up, and left with a friendly nod at Sam. If he’d been rattled at one point by Sam’s behavior, he’d gotten over it, and it didn’t show in the way he strolled toward the exit. Sam stayed in his seat for a long moment after he was gone, stomach churning, his whole body chilled to the bone. Then he shook himself, gathered his stuff in a hurry and almost ran out of the library.

He walked across campus, instinctively heading in the direction of his hall even though he had class in less than half an hour. He felt shaky, a million thoughts dashing uncontrolled through his mind, and he didn’t think he’d be able to focus on anything until he talked to his brother, so he snaked a hand into his pocket to get to his phone. The phone started ringing right at that moment and Sam knew, with that flash of sibling sixth sense that hit now and then, that it was his brother calling. 

“Dean,” he said to the phone without preamble, “I need to talk to you.”

“Did you find anything about—”

“No,” Sam snapped. He wasn’t sure yet if he should get mad because—well, he didn’t know Ansem from Adam and the guy seemed shady as hell, so of course Sam didn’t trust him but… Sam could feel in his gut that Ansem was right; Dean hadn’t been straight with him, and it pissed him off. “I didn’t find anything noteworthy on the halls, but I still need to talk to you. Now. And don’t bring Vivian with you.”

“What? What’s the matter, Sammy? Did something happen? Hey, are you alright? Did—”

Not in the mood for Dean’s big brother routine, Sam cut him off, “Not on the phone. I need to talk to you about the yellow-eyed man.”

He’d meant for the words to be a bomb, and the silence he got in return made his blood turn cold. He’d been right, then. Dean _had_ been lying to him.

“Meet me at…” He thought about it for a moment—they still needed to avoid being seen together on campus, and Sam knew Dean would refuse to go to his old haunts and risk seeing people from his teenage years. “Meet me at the corner of Stonehenge Drive and Overland.”

Then he hung up, unwilling to give his brother the chance to protest. He took a deep breath and kept it trapped inside his lungs, taking a moment to center himself as he looked around. There was a cluster of trees and Sam could only get a glimpse of the crenelated top of the stone building hidden behind them. A group of Japanese students walked past him, chatting excitedly over something one of them had on his phone. To get to the next bus stop, he’d need to follow down the road and take a left.

Sam released the breath he’d been holding and started walking. The bus trip up to his meeting point with Dean would give him time to sort out his thoughts. If Dean had come hunting for the yellow-eyed man—if the yellow-eyed man really did exist and had killed their father—then what did it mean for Rachel Landon? Was her death related, or was it a coincidence? And what was that Ansem dude’s role in all this?

 _Well, Sam,_ he _knows_ you.

Sam swallowed back his feeling of foreboding. _That_ was something he couldn’t think about, because every time his mind approached the memory of what Ansem had said about him, the way he’d acted as though they had some sort of privileged bond, his mind shrunk away in horror. 

He rode the bus in a state of daze. He usually liked to observe his surroundings, look at people and watch the way they talked, the way they moved, and try to imagine the kind of people they were, and public transportation was the best kind of place for people-watching. But when he got off the bus after a twenty-five-minute journey, he couldn’t have said a thing about the people who’d been in there with him.

At the crossroads of Stonehenge Drive and Overland was a small roundabout covered in unkempt grass. There was nothing of interest there, only patches of grass and fields, with a few farms in the distance. The weather had turned uncomfortably cool and damp, so Sam zipped up his jacket and buried his hands in his pockets. He saw Dean’s car, an old Chevy Impala their father had bought right before he proposed to their mother, come from afar like a black stormy cloud. Dean had always loved that car, claimed he’d been conceived in it. He had worked hard on convincing their mother not to sell it when she bought a new one, but to give it to him instead as a birthday present. Sam still remembered how weirdly peaceful those months had been.

The car pulled over, and Dean got out with a squeak of the car door. He looked stony-faced, with an expression of locked stubbornness that Sam recognized from back when he was still living at home: it meant he firmly believed in his own rightfulness, and wasn’t ready to be told otherwise.

“So, what is it?” Dean said bluntly as soon as he was close enough to speak.

Sam told him about Ansem’s visit at the library. He saw his brother tense at the part where the guy knew their names: “He has curly hair, you said?” Dean’s brow furrowed and his eyes dulled as he looked inward, deep in thought. “Damn, I don’t know why this is ringing a bell. Never mind, what else did he say?”

“That he knew all this because the yellow-eyed man told him.” He watched out for Dean’s reaction, but since he had warned him in advance, his brother managed to control it pretty well. “He said to ask you why you really came here. So, tell me, Dean: what is this really about?”

Dean looked at him for a long moment, blinds shutting down behind dull eyes. It was an expression that both freaked Sam out and infuriated him. “If I had told you about the yellow-eyed man,” Dean said, “would you have even listened to me? You never believed me.”

Sam couldn’t deny this without lying through his teeth. “I’m listening now.”

Dean pinned him with his eyes for a little longer, then heaved a weary sigh and rubbed a hand over his hair. “There’s not much to say. Vivian came to me saying that she’d had a talk with a drunk student from KU talking about a yellow-eyed man. She couldn’t tell me much about the guy in question or about what he said in details. First freaky occurrence in a long line of freaky.”

“How well do you know her? How did she know about the yellow-eyed man anyway?”

“What do you think, smartass? Because I told her. And yeah, I was drunk, but she wasn’t and… Really, I can’t say that I know her, but she looks just the type to like being in control, see what I mean? That she couldn’t remember that guy, that’s not normal. Anyway, after that conversation she checked the news and saw the article about Rachel’s death and thought it was a strange coincidence. She thought I might be interested in doing some digging.”

Sam remained silent for a moment, digesting the information. He’d been angry with his brother, but now…. he wasn’t sure what to say; anger was a blunt, uncomplicated emotion and now he missed it. He felt an ache he couldn’t name, low in his stomach, like he’d swallowed something pointy and it was now poking at his insides.

“What are you going to do if you find that yellow-eyed man?”

Dean snorted, upper lip curling like Sam had said something amusing. “What do you think? Kill him, of course. You know, I’ve always called him the yellow-eyed _man_ , but there’s no way that thing is an actual man.”

“Are you going to call Mom?”

All traces of a smile vanished from Dean’s face. “Why would I do that?”

“Don’t play dumb.” There it was, the refreshing burn of anger coming to his rescue. “If this thing killed Dad, then Mom’s been hunting it for almost—”

“Mom has always said,” Dean’s voice rose up to cover Sam, “that the yellow-eyed man didn’t exist!” 

“Oh, come on—”

“She _always_ said—She made me believe—You—” Dean was now pointing his finger harshly to punctuate his words. “She made _you_ believe I was crazy!”

“ _She was just worried about you!_ ” Sam’s shouting momentarily shut his brother up, so Sam gulped hurriedly a much needed breath and continued, “You act like all she’s ever tried to do is ruin your life or something, but what she wants is only for you to be safe!”

“Safe? Knowing what’s out there?” Dean stepped back and turned away, a muscle jumping on his cheek. Like he couldn’t stand looking at Sam anymore. “Man, I don’t know how you do it. How you can live your normal college life when you know what’s hiding in the dark.”

Sam felt the blow as keenly as if Dean had punched him. He recoiled a bit, gritting his teeth. “And so what, huh? Yeah, I know there are ghosts. I know there are monsters. This isn’t gonna stop me from living my life.”

Dean spun around to face Sam. “And you feel _nothing_? No responsibility for—”

“Are we responsible for everything? You know there are human monsters too, right? You know there are natural catastrophes. You know people are dying from hunger—”

‘What’s your point?”

“Do you feel responsible for them too? What’re you doing to help them?”

“That’s not the same thing!”

“How is that not—”

“Because everyone knows about the stuff you mentioned. Not everyone knows about the things _we_ know.”

Sam clapped his mouth shut, his chest heaving with leftover anger, uncertain how to answer that. “Okay,” he said, combing a hand through his hair and working on getting his breathing under control. “Okay. You win. I’m a selfish bastard.”

“Damn it, Sam.” Dean seemed to deflate, his shoulders sagging like under a sudden weight, and he swiped a hand over his mouth. “That’s not what I meant.”

 _The fuck did you mean, then?_ Sam took a deep breath in, feeling oddly shaky and exhausted. “Are you going to call Mom or not? Or maybe I should do it. If the thing that killed Dad really is around…”

Dean gave him a hard look, then shook his head with a rueful chuckle. “Jesus. You’re like a fucking bloodhound, are you?” His eyes drifted away. “I was ready to call the whole thing a bust, at least when it comes to the yellow-eyed man, but now with what this Ansem guy said… Okay.”

“Okay?”

Dean shrugged, looking at the tips of his boots. “I’m _not_ calling Mom. But you do whatever you want.” His sentence was barely finished and he was already walking to his car. He stopped with his hand in his pocket, fumbling for his key. “Need a ride back?”

Sam shook his head and hair flopped in his eyes. “Nah, I’m good. I’ll take the bus.” He realized he wasn’t even sure when the next scheduled bus was. “Or I’ll walk. It’s fine.”

“You sure?”

Sam waved for him to go, plastering a reassuring smile on his face. Dean scrunched his face doubtfully, but eventually he shrugged and got into his car. The Impala left with a deep rumble, tailed by a cloud of smoke all the way.

\---

_Ansem Beckett._

The name had bugged Mary as soon as Bill had said it. Call it female intuition, or just a hunter’s intuition, or maybe it was only that she had worked on this case for so long and thought she knew it so well, that it was jarring to have to handle a new piece of the puzzle.

“Bill!” she called, doing her best to keep her voice steady. 

She kept her eyes on the screen of the computer in Karen’s office on the second floor, listening for Bill’s footsteps coming up to her. Although the room was impeccable, and Mary knew she wouldn’t find even one speck of dust in there, it wasn’t quite as tidy as everywhere else in the house. Other than the writing desk where the computer sat and a loveseat tucked in a corner, the only furniture were the bookshelves lined along the walls. It was obvious that the books had once been sorted by topics and alphabetical order, but at one point the shelves had overflowed and some of the books were piled at the top of the shelves and even on the floor, making the room feel crowded and at odds with the glossy catalog quality of the rest of the house. Mary suspected the office had once been Karen’s husband’s, but it was now open to use for all the hunters who stopped by Karen’s refuge. 

Bill’s voice floated up to her from somewhere down the stairs: “Yeah? What is it?”

“Can you come here for a sec?”

She found herself shrouded in shadow when Bill’s tall figure came to obscure the light from the doorway.

“I was looking up Ansem Beckett,” she explained, turning the screen so he could see. “And guess what? He’s a student.” She heard the false calm in her voice start to crack, and Bill probably heard it too because he stepped into the room. “At KU Lawrence.”

Bill’s hand dropped on the back of her chair. “Where Sam is.”

“Yes. It can’t be a coincidence.” She blinked at the screen for a few more seconds, and her fingers curled in her lap. “Bill.”

“I know. Give me half-an-hour to get ready and we’ll leave.”

“Okay. I’ll… I’ll try to call Sam.”

She tried. A few dozen times, but Sam wasn’t answering. There could be many innocuous reasons for that: maybe he was out of battery, or he’d forgotten his phone, or had turned it off because he was studying—something he often did. Mary wasn’t an overly anxious person by nature, but since John had died she had never been able to stop worrying about her sons, and especially about Sam, the anxiety only fueled by her uncertainty as to why the yellow-eyed demon had come for him that night. Now she couldn’t help but think of the people murdered in Arizona, of Max Miller, born the same year as Sam, both a victim and a killer. Ansem Beckett anywhere in the vicinity of her son could only be bad news.

They left Karen’s in a hurry, and Mary knew that she was scaring her friends with her urgency, but she couldn’t worry about that at the moment. Karen promised to let them know about anything her hunter friends would uncover about the other kids, packed them a box of cookies for the trip, and extorted from them the promise to call her with an update as soon as they could. 

Bill drove, while Mary tried a few more times to call Sam, with no success. She didn’t leave more than one message on his answering machine. She didn’t want to worry him in case there was nothing wrong. She kept instinctively pressing her feet against the floor, where the gas pedal would be if she were in the driver’s seat, tensing her whole body in a futile effort to make the car go faster. She wished they’d just flown over to Lawrence, but they never could have gotten their truck-full worth of weapons past airport security.

“Any chance?” Bill asked. His tone was casual but he held the wheel in a white-knuckled grip.

“No. Maybe he…” She was going to drone out one of the possible explanations she had thought of, but suddenly couldn’t muster the energy. It wasn’t as if Bill wouldn’t see right through her act anyway.

“I’m sure he’s okay, Mary.” This was the kind of empty words of comfort that didn’t deserve a reply, but Bill surprised her by adding: “Did you try to call Dean?”

Mary couldn’t help the way her heart stuttered in her chest, hearing that name in a conversation where she wasn’t expecting it. “No? Why would I—”

“Maybe he’s in the area and can check on Sam faster than us. Maybe he knows something we don’t. Maybe he’s even _with_ Sam at the moment.”

“I don’t think that—” Mary started, but swallowed back her words. She knew Sam and Dean called each other, so why wouldn’t they see each other too? “I don’t even know if the number I have for him is still good.”

She had her phone in her hand and she looked at it, willing herself to make the call but unable to move her fingers. She was startled when the phone began to ring: it was Sam, and it took her a second to realize it and pick up the call. “Sam, baby, are you—”

“Mom? Wow, slow down. I saw that you tried to call me. I’m sorry, I was out of battery and I didn’t realize it until—”

“No, it’s fine. As long as you’re okay.” She forced herself to breathe so she wouldn’t sound too off-kilter and scare him. “Listen, Sam—there’s this boy in your school, his name’s Ansem Beckett, and you need to stay away from him. Do you understand? I’m coming to you with Bill, but we won’t be there until tomorrow. We were in South Dakota and—” Sam’s end was completely silent, and Mary’s heartbeat picked up again. “Sam? Sammy?”

Bill was casting her looks, but he didn’t try to butt into the conversation.

“Still here,” Sam said eventually. He sounded calm, but oddly flat too, almost emotionless. “I met Ansem already, but I don’t think you need to worry about him; I don’t think he wants to harm me—not for the moment, anyway. But you still need to come here, because he mentioned the yellow-eyed man to me. I called because I thought it might be of some interest to you.”

“The… what?” The whiplash from worry to relief didn’t leave Mary enough brain space to process what her son was telling her. _The yellow-eyed man. She_ knew there was a connection between the demon and Ansem Beckett (and Sam, and all the other children), but how did _Sam_ know about it? “Is your brother with you?” was the only thing she could think of saying.

“Yes.” Sam’s voice was dry as a bone bleached white by the sun. She couldn’t remember ever hearing him taking this tone with her. “He is. Look, Mom, we’ll talk about it when you’ll get here. Don’t worry, Dean and I can handle it.”

“Wait, Sam—”

Sam had already hung up. Mary clenched her teeth hard, her fingers clamping on her phone. To Bill’s questioning look she only said, “Drive faster.”

The rest of the trip was a blur. Instead of stopping for the night they just switched drivers and went on. Bill dropped asleep as soon as he settled in the passenger seat, leaving her alone. Mary drove through the darkness and the odd twirl of fog, the car’s lights like two beacons always on the verge of being swallowed by the dark. Although she hadn’t had any sleep she didn’t feel tired at all, but wired instead with nervous energy. She knew she was getting too old not to pay for this later; right now, she didn’t care. Her gut-wrenching worry for her son had subsided with his call, but now her mind was whirling with so many different emotions, so many thoughts, all tangled together in impossible knots. Her Sam hearing about the yellow-eyed man, knowing she’d lied to him—oh god, the _betrayal_ in her boy’s voice. Sam was a bit of an all-or-nothing type, nursing grudges for years like jealously guarded treasures. He could forgive his brother the invention of a yellow-eyed boogieman because he’d been a child himself then; Mary wasn’t so sure he would forgive her her masquerade of the truth. 

And _Dean_. Just thinking about him, about seeing him and talking to him after years of silence, had her mind short-circuiting. She couldn’t imagine what that reunion would be like; she needed to be way more prepared for this, she needed more sleep, better circumstances. The way she’d envisioned it—because she’d never for one moment resigned herself to never speaking to him again—it always happened after she’d offed the demon that had killed John and stopped whatever his plans for Sam were. When everything got back to normal, she could call Dean, could try to make him see that all she’d ever wanted was to protect him from a soul-destroying life-style and a quest that would only get him killed. Only she wasn’t given any choice, was she; if she wanted to take this quest to its conclusion, she had to contend with Sam and Dean’s involvement in it.

It was dawn when they reached Lawrence. They stopped at Mary’s house; she changed her clothes and both of them had a shower before Mary called Sam. It was decided that they would meet here, at the house, and even as Sam agreed easily Mary thought that she would’ve liked to be a fly on the wall when her youngest tried to convince his brother to come.

“Hey, you okay?”

His hair dark from the shower, Bill was leaning against the doorframe, looking at her. Mary put back the phone on its base and faked a smile. “They’ll be there shortly.”

“You’re a master of avoidance, Winchester.”

“I’ll be fine. It’s just…” She shook her head. “But I made my bed, didn’t I?”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

She blinked at him, then barked a short, surprised laugh. “Look who’s talking,” she said.

\---

Never had so short a car trip seemed so long. In the passenger seat Sam kept playing with his phone, his head hung low, his hair falling over his eyes like some of those fucking froufrou curtains; in the backseat Vivian was silent, and in the cut-out image of the rearview mirror Dean could only see part of her shoulder and the back of her head as she looked through the window. She’d insisted on coming with them, and since she’d worked this case with him from the beginning Dean couldn’t come up with a reason good enough to keep her away. Even then, damn if the thought of all the dirty laundry they were going to air up in front of a stranger didn’t make him cringe. Bill would be there too, but he was almost family.

Heaving a sigh —were they ever going to _get there_?—Dean fumbled for the dial of the radio, hoping to keep his mind off things with some music, but Sam slapped his hand away.

“Don’t.”

“Hey! Mind the attitude, dude. My car, my—”

Sam raised his head minutely to shoot him a look from in-between his bangs. “Dean, please, don’t.”

“ _Fine_.” Dean put his hand back on the wheel. It didn’t take long before his fingers, almost on their own volition, started to beat rhythmically while he hummed _Fire of Unknown Origin_. He looked pointedly at Sam, daring him to say anything, but his brother only huffed and kept pressing buttons on his phone, albeit maybe a little more angrily. Why was Sam so snappy anyway? Okay, Dean hadn’t been perfectly honest with him about this gig, but now he knew everything, no more secret, and he wasn’t the one heading toward a family crisis. Dean tried not to think about it too much.

When he parked on the other side of the street from the house, the sun was just flirting with the top of the roof, crowning it with light. Dean turned off the engine but didn’t make another move. He heard Vivian open up the door on her side and step out of the car, but Sam remained in his seat too. When Dean dared look in his direction, expecting Sam’s face of disapproval, he found that his brother was giving a soft, considering look.

“You don’t have to come in,” he said. “I can—”

“You’re telling me this _now_? After I psyched myself all the way to here? No can do, dude.” He pulled on the lapels of his jacket, straightening it. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Outside the car Vivian was waiting for them with her arms crossed, her feet stomping on the ground against the early morning temperature. When they joined them she jerked her chin in a _‘finally’_ sort of gesture, but kept silent and followed them in locked step when they crossed the street.

Looking at it from the outside, the house was still the same. At least it matched pretty closely the image of it that Dean had tucked away in a corner of his memory: the tall elm tree shadowing one corner of the house, and the old swing swaying from one of the lower branches, its strings frayed with age. The bushes under the windows, always in need of a good cut because their mother rarely took the time to care for them, in spite of her claims that she liked gardening. The rusty tricycle half-hidden by the stairs leading to the porch, Sam’s or Dean’s, that they had never gotten rid of. It was almost like jumping backward in time.

Dean felt Sam bump his shoulder. “Dean?”

“Yeah.” His throat felt closed up as though from anaphylactic shock. He took a breath in, drawing as much air as he could into his lungs, but it still didn’t feel like enough. “I’ll, uh, let you lead the way, Sammy.”

Behind him he heard Vivian’s clothes swoosh as she fidgeted, and he knew she was getting impatient with their stalling. Well, tough shit for her, but she was the one who had insisted on coming with them.

Sam looked at him one last time, then nodded. In a few strides of those freakishly long legs of his he was at the front door, shuffling his feet over on the doormat and fiddling his key in the keyhole. 

“Mom,” he called as the pushed the front door open. “Mom, we’re—”

Mary had been probably waiting for them, watching the street through the lacy curtains from the kitchen window overlooking the front lawn.

“Thanks for coming,” she said formally, kissing Sam on the cheek but looking over his shoulder, her eyes warily watching Dean, fixed on him like she was expecting him to pounce at any moment.

“Hi,” Dean said, wondering if he should call her _Mom_ or _Mary_ , finding one impossible and the other absurd, and dismissing them both. He stepped aside to reveal Vivian. “This is—”

“Vivian Walker.” Bill suddenly loomed from behind Mary, looking like he’d just had a shower, which… yeah, not going there. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Just giving a hand,” Vivian said. “Do you mind?”

Bill watched her for a moment before he said, “It’s a free country.”

They went inside the house, and Dean was once more overwhelmed by a wave of _déjà vu_. This time the match between past and present was slightly off: the couch, armchairs and bookshelves had been moved around, some new pictures adorned the walls, and the rug had been changed. 

Before he could close the front door behind him and follow the rest of the party to the living area, Bill stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, leaning to whisper in his ear: “Be careful about partnering up with Vivian Walker.”

Dean shot a surprised look to Bill, then to Vivian’s lean back as she exchanged greetings with his mother. “What d’you mean?”

“You don’t want to tangle with obsession like that. If you get sucked into it you can end up as collateral damage.”

Dean looked at Bill, turned his head in direction of his mother and brother, then looked back at Bill, a pointed eyebrow lifted up. “I know a thing or two about obsession.”

They all settled in the living room and Mary offered them some tea. While she was gone in the kitchen, Dean’s eyes got caught by the thin image cut out by the half-open door of his former room: there he could see bookshelves and the corner of a desk, and couldn’t help the unexpected stab of betrayal he felt. _What did you expect, huh? That she would preserve your room like a fucking shrine?_

They drank their tea when it was ready and no one talked for a moment. Dean swallowed his like a shot of liquor rather than sipping it like Sam did. It burned his tongue and throat and tasted like freshly cut grass. He made a face and stuck the empty, still hot cup between his knees. Sam glanced irritably at him, but it was familiar irritation of the _‘won’t you behave!_ variety.

“Shall we share information?” Sam said haughtily to their mother. “That means, we’re straight with you, and _you_ ’re straight with us.” Dean caught the flash of hurt in Mary’s expression before she could cover it with a hunter’s poker face.

“Alright,” she said. “Tell me what you know.”

Sam related the death of Rachel Landon, the bizarre behavior of her roommate at the joined houses party, and Ansem’s little talk at the library.

“We thought that Rachel and Vicky might have fallen victim to some form of possession, but now we think—” There he shared a quick look with Dean, like checking with him on the use of the plural pronoun. “We think maybe Ansem’s done something to them. After I called you I went to talk with Vicky again, and she told me that lately she’d been harassed by a boy and Rachel had played bodyguard. She’d also urged Vicky to file a complaint against that guy, but the strange thing is that, even though he’s been bothering her so much, she couldn’t remember his name or give a precise description of him. That, combined to Ansem showing up out of the blue…”

“Ansem Beckett’s definitely involved,” Mary said. She was speaking stiffly, holding herself ramrod straight in a way that didn’t match any of Dean’s memories of her.

“How do you know that?” Sam asked.

Mary exchanged a look with Bill and Bill unfurled from his armchair, pushing himself up with his hands on his knees. “Vivian?” he said, and tilted his head toward the door. “Wanna have a word with me outside?”

There no shortage of belligerence in the way Vivian looked at him, and Dean braced himself for a big showdown between the two, but then her eyes swept over the whole Winchester family, and she said, “Not really. But yeah, I’ll go with you.”

After the two had gone, Dean, Sam and their mother were left looking at each other, in some kind of three-way Mexican standoff where everyone was sitting and no one was holding a gun. Yet. “Family reunions, right?” Dean said. “Fun times.”

To his surprise, Mary gently snorted and shook her head. That same amused shake of the head that had been her reactions to his antics when he was much younger. Then she was serious again: “Ansem Beckett is part of a list of young people born in 1983 who had fires happen in their house when they were six-month old. And it all ties up somehow to the… the yellow-eyed man Dean saw in Sam’s room the night your dad died.”

All the blood in Dean’s body suddenly turned cold, like rivers during a winter freeze. “I thought the yellow-eyed man was just a figment of my imagination.” This wasn’t what he’d meant to say; it sounded like a snippy, passive-aggressive, bratty comeback, because he’d always _known_ —almost always—that the yellow-eyed man existed. But in his weaker moments he’d managed to convince himself that his mother genuinely thought he wasn’t real.

“He’s a demon,” Mary continued, her eyes downcast on her hands, speaking fast like she’d worked herself up to a point where she had no choice but to get it all out. “It. Different from most demons who make it topside but I know close to nothing about it, except that it’s working—has been working for decades—on some sort of plan involving children and—”

 _You knew. You’ve always known_ , Dean thought as he listened to his mother, but he didn’t want to interrupt her because he was finally getting the truth and there was no stopping it now.

“A few of those kids seem to have manifested some kind of… psychic abilities. One of them could see the future. Another was telekinetic. Whatever is going on in your school…” Here her eyes flickered lightning-fast to Sam. “It’s too big a coincidence. He has to be the one doing it.”

Sam hadn’t said a word in a while. It was so unusual for him that Dean forgot his feelings of betrayal and looked at his brother in concern: his own petty grievances were nothing new, but Sam had actually entertained the illusion that hunting was something that didn’t concern him if he decided it didn’t. Seeing it shattered had to sting like a motherfucker.

“Sammy?” he called, weirded out by the kid’s silence and the blank look on his face. Sam was never _blank_ : he wore every emotion on his face like a badge of pride.

“If Ansem has a psychic ability it has to be some sort of mind control,” Sam said, and his voice had the same bland quality as his face. “He made Rachel jump out of the window because she was in his way, and he made Vicky slap me because… Because I was talking to her, I guess? Because he was afraid of what she might tell me, or maybe just because he was jealous.”

“He can control people, then,” Mary said, and she had finally stopped staring at her hands. “Even from a distance, apparently, or else he just made people forget he was there at all. Because if there had been a boy in the house when Rachel Landon died, one of the girls would have mentioned it.”

Okay, so that was how they were going to play it, apparently: business now, emotional fallout later. Dean could work with that.

“Something I don’t get,” he said, “If Ansem wanted Sam to stop talking to Vicky, why didn’t he just _make_ him stop? So far he’d avoided using his mind trick on her—he could have made her fall into his arms or whatever, but he didn’t. Instead he flew her nagging roommate out of the window. Why didn’t he do the same with Sam?”

He regretted his question when he saw his brother’s mouth twitch and his nostrils flare. “I think,” Sam said in a strangled voice, “that maybe it’s because he can’t. Maybe—”

The front door opened and Dean felt a surge of annoyance—first family talk in years and they couldn’t get ten minutes without anyone barging in.

Sam, who was facing the entrance, said, “Vivian? Where’s Bill?”

Dean turned around and saw Vivian, standing tall in the empty doorway that led to the entrance hall, her gun in her hand and pointed like she was about to use it. Bill was nowhere to be seen. “Vivian? What the hell—”

She turned to him and fired her gun. Sam and Mary both cried out. Dean’s shoulder exploded with pain, and his world faded to black. 

\---

It had happened so fast that Sam’s brain didn’t seem able to catch up. Part of him was still stuck on the conversation they’d just had, the reveals his mom had thrown to their faces—to _his_ face, goddamn it, how could she hide that from _him_ —while the other part saw Vivian shoot his brother without warning. He heard himself shout but it didn’t sound right, like watching a movie where the sound and image are out of sync. 

“ _Dean!_ ”

The impact of the bullet had sent Dean right back in the chair he’d been sitting in before, and Sam could see a dark spot of blood spreading as the fabric soaked it up.

“Listen, I don’t know what you want—”

The panicked edge in his mom’s voice, so unusual, made Sam tear his eyes away from his bleeding brother. He saw that Vivian was now turning to her, even though Sam was closer. The analytical part of his brain that never seemed to shut up stashed that thought away for further analysis, while his body leaped forward like he could catch her in time. A scream escaped him, coming from deep in his gut: “No! _Stop!_ ”

No one was more surprised than he was when Vivian actually stopped. Sam froze, panting like after a long run, his heart beating too fast in his chest. “Don’t move,” he added, his voice a little trembling.

Vivian didn’t move — _at all_. She was still but in a completely unnatural way: her gun hand still raised, her other hand slightly away from her body, fingers stretched. She looked frozen mid-step, like in a game of red light, green light.

Sam slowly walked around her so he could look at her face, and with each step his heartbeat slowed down until it was back to normal. When he saw Vivian’s eyes, though, his heart went up a notch once more.

“Oh, God.”

Her face was scrunched up with effort, her eyes almost bulging out of their sockets. They followed Sam’s movements with piercing intensity, and if looks could send bullets Sam had a feeling he’d be the one with a hole in his body right now.

“Vivian, are you—”

“Look at her. She’s torn between two different directions at once; I wonder how long we can keep this game going before her brain start leaking from her ears.”

Sam wasn’t much surprised to see Ansem step into the room, but he heard his mother utter a slight gasp. She’d gone to Dean’s side and was pressing a handkerchief to his wound. The makeshift pad was already completely red from the blood, but Dean was groaning softly and his eyelids fluttered rapidly as he struggled for consciousness.

“I didn’t think you had it in you, Sammy!”

Sam’s first instinct was to tell Ansem off for calling him _Sammy_ , but there were more urgent matters at hand. “What do you mean?” he said through gritted teeth.

“What, you don’t get it?” Sam wanted to smack the smirk right off his smug face; Ansem must have felt it because he didn’t wait for another clueless and pissed-off question before babbling on: “This is _your_ doing. You stopped her with your ability. You’re just like me!”

Sam’s ears started to ring, almost drowning the rest of Ansem’s ramblings: “I wondered if you had manifested an ability already—you’re a little late, you know, but that’s the power of denial for you. I’m glad I got to see your first time; this is so exciting! It’s like we’re brothers.”

That last word snapped Sam right back. “No, we’re not. You _shot_ my brother!”

At his periphery he saw that Dean was conscious now, albeit very pale, looking like all the blood from his face had leaked out of his bullet wound. His eyes were locked on Ansem, and even in his state it looked like the only thing keeping from jumping to the guy’s throat was Mom’s hands on his shoulder and chest.

“What did you do to Bill?” Sam asked Ansem.

“Me? Nothing.” He pointed a thumb toward Vivian; her whole body had started trembling and Sam worried that Ansem’s talk of leaking brains was not a hyperbole. “She wacked him good over the head, though. But don’t worry, he’s alive. I think.”

Not a whole lot of comfort, but there wasn’t much Sam could do about it for now.

“Let Vivian go,” he said. “Let all of them go.”

“Let me think… Nah. I don’t care if her brain does leak out of ears, but don’t worry—for that to happen you would have to strong enough to fight me, but you aren’t, Sam, not yet. I’ve been at it longer than you have.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to help you get rid of your family, Sam. I’m doing this for you, man, believe it or not. You don’t see it but they’re slowing you down.”

“Like your mother slowed you down?” Mom asked. “Is that why you killed her? Made her douse herself in gasoline and set herself on fire?”

Even if Sam had already known that Ansem was capable of murder, this tidbit of information had fear dig into his insides. A guy who’d killed his own mother wouldn’t stop at anything to destroy Sam’s family.

Ansem went pale at Mom’s words, dropping his ever-present smile like a hot potato. “You don’t know anything. She deserved it. She was a killer!”

“And you would know all about it, wouldn’t you?” Sam said.

Ansem turned back to Sam, stepping forward, and even if Sam was more or less convinced Ansem didn’t want to harm him he couldn’t help an involuntary jerk of fear. “I had a brother too, you know,” Ansem said in a trembling voice. “A twin brother. His name was Andy. He was my other half, Sam, and she let him burn. So it was only justice—fire for _fire_.”

“I’m sure she tried to save him,” Mom said. “She probably didn’t have the time—”

“Shut up!” Ansem yelled, throwing his arms up in the air. Mom’s mouth was instantly sealed shut, bloodless lips pressed in a tight line. “She had two arms, for god’s sake! She could have saved him if she’d wanted to, but she never even wanted to be pregnant, let alone with two babies. It was her mother that convinced her to keep us. But by the time of the fire Grandma was dead, so my mother seized that occasion to get rid of one kid and let my brother die!”

Ansem looked seriously unhinged now, his usually pale face red with anger and his teeth bare like he wanted to take a bite out of Mom. “It’s like that bitch, Vicky! I _tried_ to make her like me without using my power, God knows I tried, and at first I thought that her friend Rachel was the one turning her against me with poisonous words, but even after her death Vicky wouldn’t talk to me!”

Sam saw Dean quirk an eyebrow at that, and could almost hear the smartass comment: _And you were surprised, lover boy?_ None of them dared say anything, though.

“It’s because they’re just _people_ , Sammy.” Ansem’s attention was once again on Sam and it seemed to calm him down, like he genuinely thought that he might have a kindred spirit in Sam. “They’re just puppets for us to use. I get it now. I know what the yellow-eyed man wants: he wants us to raise above our human condition.”

Intent on his message he took another step, closer to Sam and away from the entrance hall where Sam could see a large figure looming.

“What the hell does that mean?” Sam asked, hoping to distract Ansem from Bill’s coming behind him.

It was in vain; Bill raised his fist but froze mid-air, and Ansem didn’t turn around but tension was marked in the way his jaw was set and his fingers clenched in fists. On the right, out of Ansem’s vision field, Sam saw Vivian twitch and he wondered: had Ansem ever had that many people under his control? He knew that Ansem was right, that he had more practice at this mind control thing than Sam had, and if they were fighting to keep control over one person there was no way he would win. Except that Ansem was trying now to control four different people at the same time, and Sam was already fighting with him for Vivian. What if—

His eyes met with his brother’s, and for one moment the communication was wide open between them: because Dean was injured, Ansem’s attention was off him and if Sam gave it a shove he could help Dean break Ansem’s hold on him. On paper it sounded like a good plan, but the thought of actually doing it, of consciously using this power he didn’t understand on his brother made Sam’s head spin. 

Could he do it? Could he live with himself after crossing that line?

“Alright,” Ansem said, with a fake cheerful note that couldn’t hide the strain in his voice from the effort he was making. “I think it’s time to end this masquerade. Sammy, you got to work with me here. Let Vivian go.”

If Ansem was asking, it meant that it wasn’t that easy for him to tighten his leash on Vivian. _Decision time, Sammy_. If he let Vivian go, Ansem was going to make her kill his family.

“You and me, Sam.” Ansem held out a hand to Sam; his eyes, wide and intense, were of a blue so clear they looked like pools of water under a clear sky, trying to draw Sam and make him fall into them. “With the yellow-eyed man’s help, we will take over the world.”

“Is that what he promised you?” 

“He promised me _everything_.”

“He’s a demon, Ansem. Demons lie.”

Sam looked at his family: his brother’s eyes, clouded over with pain but determined; his mother, her blond hair dark with perspiration. His mother who had lied to him all his life, but had also loved him, raised him, showed him how the world really was and taught him to fight.

“A demon?” Ansem said with a derisive snort. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s not lying to us; he’s the only one who’s telling the _truth_. Look at what we can do!”

Sweat beaded on Ansem’s forehead. He was now almost close enough for Sam to punch him, but not quite, and if Ansem saw it coming the consequences would be dire. Right now all of Ansem’s attention was aimed at Sam, intent on convincing him, so earnest about it that Sam felt in equal part bad for him and creeped out by his attempt to have Sam replace the brother he’d lost in the fire. 

_Dean_. He took care in forming the name in his mind, tried to make it as intentional and clear as if he were saying it out loud. If Ansem could do it, it meant that it was _possible. Go for it. Punch his lights out._

For a few suspended seconds he didn’t know if it had worked. Then Dean sprung from his chair and threw a punch at Ansem. He was weak and shaky, though, probably from a combination of both the injury and the double mind control, and his fist only grazed Ansem’s temple. Ansem wavered, brought a hand to the side of his head, and barked in a voice deformed by pain and anger: “Vivian! Kill him!”

Sam could feel the toll using his newfound power was taking on him, an ache that wasn’t entirely physical but more like a sort of mind-cramp, and he knew he couldn’t stop Vivian the same way he had before. He jumped on her and managed to catch her gun arm just when her finger was about to press the trigger. The shot went wild and the bullet lodged itself in the ceiling. Sam gripped both of Vivian’s wrists and tried to wrestle her before she could fire another shot, but she was strong and it took all he had to manage to fold her arms against her chest. Her gun was stuck between them and she was twisting her hand so she could aim it at Sam.

“Mom!”

Dean’s call behind him fired like a shot, and Sam couldn’t turn to look at what was going on. He crushed Vivian’s hand in his, tugging at her fingers, trying to make her drop her gun. Her eyes burned in her face and she looked at him with such hatred that Sam thought it couldn’t just be Ansem’s influence. He heard groans, shouts, the muffled sound of flesh hitting flesh. His mother and brother fighting Ansem—which meant that Ansem was now having a hard time controlling them.

“Let it go,” Sam hissed through his teeth, trying to get to Vivian somehow. “ _Let it go_.”

She stopped resisting suddenly and Sam let go of her hands; when it didn’t look like she was going to try to shoot him, he hurried to his family’s help. It appeared that they no longer needed the help, though: they’d taken hold of Ansem on both sides, and although they were both out of breath and Dean’s front was covered in gore, they didn’t look worse for the wear. Bill had finally lowered his fist, but from his owlish expression he seemed to have trouble grasping what had happened to him. Ansem’s face was bruised and he was blinking rapidly, clinging to consciousness but quickly losing ground. 

“What the fuck are we gonna do with him?” Dean rasped, looking himself like he was seconds away from dropping to the floor. “When he gets his marbles together, he’ll just use us as puppets all over again.” Not a word on Sam’s apparent immunity, not that Sam wanted to open that can of worms just now.

“I suggest we keep him unconscious for now,” Mom said. “Let me get—”

 _Bang!_ They all jumped in surprised. Dean yelled and let go of Ansem, losing his balance and falling to his knees while the body crumpled on his side. Sam blinked and wiped at his face where he’d felt something warm splash him—blood, grey matter—absent-mindedly at first, then a little frantically. He looked in the direction where the shot had come from: it was Vivian, of course, her eyes cold and in her hands the gun Sam had left her.

“Problem solved,” she said, and tucked her weapon away.

\---

Looking through the crack where the half-open door was hinged, Mary observed Vivian saying her goodbyes to Dean before Sam took her back to her own car. Between getting rid of the body without alarming the neighbors and patching Dean up, it’d been close to four hours since Ansem’s death and Mary still didn’t know what to think about what had happened. It was a conundrum: on the one hand, the way Vivian had gunned down a twenty-two-year old kid was downright chilling; but on the other hand, none of them had known what to do with him and there was a guilty sense of relief at having the problem taken off their hands.

“I’m still holding you to that promise you made me,” Vivian was saying, looking down on Dean, who was making efforts to sit straight on the couch.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Dean said vaguely. “That was some cold-blooded shit you did there.”

“Someone had to make a call, and I could tell no one else was going to do what needed to be done.”

“Yeah, I know. I mean, just, _damn_. That kid was Sammy’s age.”

Mary couldn’t see Vivian’s face but she saw her body language shift at the mention of Sam’s name: tensing, bringing her arms to her front like as if to defend herself.

“You’ll need to keep an eye on your brother.” She was speaking so low that Mary almost couldn’t hear her.

Dean’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Just to keep an eye on him. Look at what he did to me—to _you_. Did it seem natural to you? One day he may not quite be your brother anymore.”

The phone rung before Dean could answer that. Mary let a few seconds pass so she wouldn’t betray that she’d been listening in when she crossed the living room to get to the phone in the entrance hall. It was Karen, who told her that another of the kids from the list, Scott Carey, had fried his neighbor’s cat. She hung up the phone with the feeling that her insides had frozen and were weighing her down to the ground.

Bill materialized by her side. He wasn't looking at her, but at Sam and Vivian climbing into the Impala through the panes of glass bordering the front door. There was crusty blood matting his hair where he’d been hit by Vivian.

“Do you know her story?” he asked Mary.

“Some of it: her brother got turned, didn’t he? Vampire or werewolf or something. Heard she was damn good at the job, too. A natural.”

“It was a vampire.” Bill’s frown deepened. “She killed the thing that turned him, and now most of her time is spent tracking her brother down to give him the final haircut. She’s one of those hunters with an obsession.”

Mary was surprised by the hard edge in his voice; knowing his story, she’d have thought he wouldn’t be judgmental about mercy-killing a loved one touched by evil.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Bill said. “I, of all people, should understand her. And it’s not that I don’t—but she has a way of going about it: she’s been known to beat up hunters who tried to have a go at her fang brother. Doesn’t matter that she maybe saved their lives, because Gordon’s a hard kill, I can’t tolerate that kind of behavior in my bar. She’s also used other hunters pretty ruthlessly to get what she wants. I don’t like that Dean got tangled with her: boy’s a sucker for a pretty face, and I hope to hell it doesn’t get him killed.”

Mary thought again about the conversation she’d overheard. “You’ll find that my boy has his priorities straight.”

“Well, I sure hope so.” Outside, the Impala had turned around the corner and they couldn’t see it anymore, but only heard the echo of her deep rumble fading away. “What was that phone call? You don’t look too happy about it.”

Mary told him what she’d learned from Karen. “I know it’s only a cat, but what if it’s just a start? I’m sure Ansem Beckett started small too.”

“What’re you going to tell the boys?” When Mary didn’t answer immediately he said, “I hate to give you parental advice—”

Mary groaned. “Go ahead. You know you want to.”

“—but if you don’t tell them, you know what’s going to happen. Dean’ll just keep doing what he’s been doing so far, which is what the hell he wants, and Sam—Whatever hold you had on him is broken now. He’s not gonna take kindly to being kept out of the loop. They’re both as headstrong as their mother. So think about it.”

Bill went to the kitchen to make himself coffee, and Mary mulled over his words as she went back to the living room. There she found Dean laid down on the couch, grey-faced and grouchy.

“Did you tell Sam to be careful with my car? He needs—”

“I’m sure your brother can handle it.”

He scowled half-heartedly at her, the sort of look whose annoyance was only skin-deep, a familiar tug-of-war. The last time he’d looked at her like that, Mary thought he’d been no older than fifteen.

“He passed his driving test years ago,” she added lightly, keeping up the pretense if only for a moment. Oh, how much she wanted to hold onto that playfulness, even though it felt like her heart was about to crack her ribcage open.

“I feel so much better now,” Dean shot back mildly and closed his eye—or rather, let his eyelids droop like he was too weary for the effort of keeping them open.

His hair was shorter than when he was twenty, his face a little thinner. He hadn’t changed that much more: still the same cheekbones, the same mouth and nose, the same face that had teenage girls lining up outside their house just a few years ago. But there was a bruise marring the apple of his cheek, and shadows under his eyes that had been there even before he was shot: marks of the hunting lifestyle digging its claws in her boy, that one day would turn him into a harsh, bitter, ruthless man. She’d seen it happen often enough to take bets on it.

“You’re staring, Mom,” Dean mumbled. 

“Sorry. I’ll be—”

He cracked an eye open. “Something you wanted to tell me?”

Something? So many things that she didn’t think she’d have enough of a lifetime to find the words.

“I’m glad—that you came here with your brother. I didn’t think you would.”

He opened his other eye and pursed his mouth, lower lip jutting out in his trademark expression of disappointment. “In my most charitable moments I wanted to believe you really thought I had imagined the yellow-eyed man—well, demon.”

People always talked of heartbreaks as if they were something metaphorical; Mary begged to differ. “I wanted—” She sounded squeaky and tried to clear her throat. “I didn’t want you to get involved in this.”

“How could I not get involved? I saw my father _die_.”

“I know. I know, I—I handled it all wrong but I wanted—” She had the sudden insight that this wasn’t the moment to try justifying herself. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

He held her eyes with a hard glare for a few seconds, then his anger seemed to melt and his face slacked with exhaustion. “I’m too fucked up to fight right now. And you’re going to have your hands full with Sammy. I’d feel bad about kicking you when you’re down.”

“He’s going to hate me, isn’t he.”

“Speaking from experience, what he’s going to feel will be a little more complicated than hate.”

Right on cue, she heard the distinctive rumble of the Impala’s engine come from outside. Dean started to prop himself up, maybe to get a glimpse of his car and check if it was okay, but winced and hissed through his teeth before falling back on the couch cushions. 

“This sucks,” he whined. “From now on I’m wearing a bulletproof jacket.”

“Then they can just shoot you in the leg,” Sam said, coming in and heading directly for the couch. He shoved at his brother’s feet so that Dean moved and let him sit at the other end.

Sam hadn’t cast even a quick glance in her direction. Mary remained standing in front of the couch, crossing her arms over her chest. When she noticed how defensive her body language was, she uncrossed them and joined her fingers together. _Be brave, Mary. Courage isn’t just about shooting the monster in the face._ “I wanted to talk to you.”

Both boys’ attention instantly zeroed in on her. Sam’s fingers curled around his brother’s ankle, offering or seeking support.

“I need to—I think I need to apologize for all the things I hid from you.” She paused for a moment, expecting them to chime in, but they were both silent and looking at her with unnerving intensity. “I just wanted to protect you. And I think, maybe—I didn’t want it to be real. If I could keep you from it, then it wouldn’t touch you and one day I’ll be able to pretend….” She took a deep breath; in spite of her, her eyes kept drifting away, unable to settle on her sons. “I think it’s obvious now that there’s no escaping it. If we want to make it out alive, then we need to be in it together.”

She forced herself to look at them. They both looked so young: Dean with his bloodless face and his juvenile spiky hairstyle, and Sam, her baby, with his floppy hair and his gangly height, looking like he had yet to grow into his body. Watching her warily with unforgiving eyes, waiting for her next misstep.

“I will tell you everything I know. I think it all started—at least as far as we’re concerned—in 1973, the year you dad asked me to marry him…”

**Author's Note:**

> If you've gotten to the end, you may have noticed how open-ended this fic is... I don't know if I will write more in this verse, although I might, but I also welcome anyone who would want to play with this AU. Just drop me a line about it. :)


End file.
